'  -      - ' 


a  man's  foes  &f>aU  Be  f0ej>  of  fyiz  ot»n 


OVERHEARD   IN  ARCADY 


BY 
ROBERT    BRIDGES 


ILLUSTRATED    BY    OLIVER     HERFORD, 
F.   G.   ATTWOOD,    AND    A.   E.   STERNER 


NEW    YORK 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 
1894 


COPYRIGHT,  1894,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


TROW  DIRECTORY 

PRINTING  AND  BOOKBINDING  COMPANY 
NEW   YORK 


QJlof^er 


Long  years  you've  kept  tJie  door  ajar 
To  greet  me,  coming  from  afar; 
Long  years  in  my  accustomed  place 
r  ve  read  my  welcome  in  your  face, 
And  felt  the  sunlight  of  your  love 
Drive  back  the  years  and  gently  move 
The  tell-tale  shadow  'round  to  youth. 
You've  found  the  very  spring,  in  truth, 
That  baffles  time  —  the  kindling  joy 
That  keeps  me  in  your  heart  a  boy. 
And  now  I  send  an  unknown  guest 
To  bide  with  you  and  snugly  rest 
Beside  the  old  home1  s  inglenook.  — 
For  love  of  me  you'  II  love  my  book. 


327157 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

W.    D.    HOWELLS, I 

HENRY    JAMES, 13 

THOMAS    BAILEY    ALDRICH, 25 

FRANK    R.    STOCKTON, 35 

RICHARD    HARDING    DAVIS, 45 

F.    MARION    CRAWFORD, 57 

RUDYARD    KIPLING, 67 

GEORGE    MEREDITH, 8 1 

ROBERT    LOUIS    STEVENSON, 95 

J.    M.     BARRIE, 107 

THE    HOME    OF    ROMANCE, 117 

A    LITTLE    DINNER    IN    ARCADY, 125 


The  author  begs  to  acknowledge  the  kindness 
of  J.  A.  Mitchell,  editor  of  Life,  in  permitting 
him  to  use  the  original  illustrations  with  these 
articles  which  w7ere  published  in  Life  over 
the  signature  Droch. 


W.  D.  HOWELLS 


THE  HOUSEHOLD  OF  W.  D.  HOWELLS 


BROMFIELD  COREY,  ESQ.  ,  .     .  A  Boston  Gentleman. 
HARTLEY  HUBBARD,  .     .     .     .   Reporter  of  the  Boston  Events. 

BUSinCSS   ManaSer  Of  the 


FULKERSON,   .  . 

(      York  Every  Other  Week. 

Miss  ANNIE  KILBURN,  ...  A  New  England  Old  Maid. 

Miss  PENELOPE  LAPHAM,  .     .   \  DauShter  of  Silas  Lapham,  and 

(      betrothed  to  Tom  Corey. 

SCENE:  A  Parlor  Car  on  the  Express  train  from  Boston  to 
New  York. 


HUBBARD  (rushing  in  late,  and  recognizing  FUL 
KERSON  as  he  subsides]  :    Hello,  Fulkerson  !    What 
have  you  been  doing  in  Boston?    No  one  in  a  real 
literary  centre  like  ours  ever  heard  of  Every   Other 
Week. 

FULKERSON  :  That's  why  I  came  over.  I've  been 
to  see  all  your  Boston  publishers  and  struck  them  for 
Ads.  I  simply  said:  "Gentlemen,  Boston  is  the  in 
tellectual  hub  of  the  United  States — no  doubt  of  it. 
New  York  is  on  the  outer  rim  of  the  whirlpool  of 
Thought.  In  your  town  everybody  writes  books,  no 
body  reads  them ;  in  New  York  everybody  reads  them, 
nobody  has  a  mind  to  write  them.  Hence,  the  wise 
3 


publisher  makes'  His  books  in  Boston  and  sells  them  in 
New  York.  A  page  advertisement  in  New  York  will 
bring  you  ten  orders  to  one  from  the  same  space  in 
Boston.  Moral  —  advertise  in  Every  Other  Week  at 
$  i  oo  a  page  and  save  $900.  See  !  "  And  they  saw  me 
for  $2,000  worth  of  contracts  in  my  left-hand  pocket. 
HUBBARD  :  Whew  !  That's  better  than  writing  in 
terviews;  guess  I'll  turn  business  manager;  but  I'll  go 
on  to  New  York  first  and  interview  Howells. 
r  .  ...  I  owe  him  a  few. 

FULKERSON    (laughing)  :     He 

-  >    '-  did  you  up    brown   in    "A 

"f         )    Modern  Instance"  —  made 
*''  ^_:  ,  a  sort  of  Terrible   Example 

;\  .X'y-4  of  you.      Still,  you  oughtn't 

f  to  kick.      I  hear  the  Events 

raised    your   space  -  rate    on 

j^"'  .       ,    the  strength  of  your  no 

toriety,  and  that  scores  of 

Solid  Men  of  Boston  offered  you  bribes  to  put  them 
in  your  series  of  interviews. 

HUBBARD  (with  satisfaction*)  :  Oh,  yes.  I've  even 
been  asked  to  contribute  a  weekly  budget  of  Boston 
scandal  to  a  New  York  paper,  and  call  it  <  '  Society 
News."  I'm  right  in  the  swim  now,  my  boy. 

FULKERSON  (looking  toward  COREY,  who  has  just  re 
turned  HUBBARD  's  nod  in  a  freezing  manner}  :  Who 
is  your  friend  who  is  not  quite  sure  that  he  ought  to 
recognize  you  in  public  ? 

HUBBARD  :      Oh,   that  is  Bromfield  Corey,  Esq.  ,  a 
4 


real  Boston  Brahmin.  I  tried  to  interview  him  once 
on  the  rumored  engagement  of  his  son,  Tom  Corey, 
to  old  Silas  Lapham's  daughter  Penelope,  and  he 
snubbed  me  cold.  (With  surprise.)  By  Jove  ! 
there  she  is  in  the  seat  in  front  of  him,  and  he  does 
not  seem  to  know  her  from  Eve — different  layer  of 
society,  you  know  !  I  might  score  a  point  now  by 
introducing  him  to  his  future  daughter-in-law  as 
though  we  were  old  acquaintances.  I  met  her  once 
at  a  Veterans'  ball  in  which  Colonel  Lapham  was 
interested.  Here  goes !  (Rising.}  Mr.  Corey,  you 
ought  to  know  Miss  Penelope  Lapham,  who  is  sitting 
near  you.  This  is  Mr.  Brom field  Corey,  Miss  Lap- 
ham.  You've  possibly  heard  of  him  from  his  son. 
I've  met  you  both  professionally,  you  know  ;  re 
porter  of  the  Events ;  going  to  New  York  to  inter 
view  Howells  ;  want  to  know  why  he  has  left  Boston 
for  New  York — what  he  thinks  of  the  Four  Hundred 
as  intellectual  material — why  he  has  put  my  friend 
Fulkerson,  here,  in  a  novel — and  all  that  sort  of 
thing.  But  you  don't  know  Fulkerson?  Business 
Manager  of  Every  Other  Week — chained  lightning 
in  booming  his  sheet — full  of  schemes  and  bound  to 
win.  Look  around,  Fulkerson  !  Here  are  some  Bos 
ton  people  who  have  heard  of  your  paper  and  want  to 
know  you.  Miss  Lapham,  this  is  Mr.  Fulkerson  ; 
Mr.  Corey,  you  must  know  my  friend.  Curious, 
isn't  it,  that  Howells  should  have  put  us  all  in  his 
books  ?  And  there  is  another  of  us  !  Miss  Annie 
Kilburn,  of  Hatboro'  ;  met  her  when  I  went  down 
5 


there  to  write  up  the  Northwick  defalcation.  Miss 
Kilburn,  I  want  to  introduce  a  lot  of  friends  of  Mr. 
Howells  to  you — all  met  by  chance  in  a  parlor-car. 
(Presents  everybody.)  Now  I  have  an  idea.  While 
we  are  waiting  for  the  call  to  dinner,  let  us  give  our 
opinions  of  Howells.  He  has  given  the  world  his 
opinion  of  us  ;  let  us  return  the  compliment.  I  give 
you  my  word,  Mr.  Corey,  I  shan't  publish  it — just  a 
little  "literary  symposium"  to  pass  away  the  time. 
See  !  Come,  Miss  Lapham,  youth  and  beauty  first, 
you  know  ! 

PENELOPE  (looking  shyly  at  COREY)  :  Oh,  I  can't 
say  exactly  what  I  think  about  Mr.  Howells  \  He 
helped  me  once  out  of  a  great  trouble.  I  wanted  to 
make  a  life-long  sacrifice  to  what  I  thought  was  Duty. 
It  would  have  made  several  people  miserable  for  life, 
but  I  thought  that  did  not  matter  so  long  as  it  was 
Duty.  Then  he  showed  me  that  what  many  people 
called  Duty  was  an  extreme  form  of  selfishness  which 
liked  to  pride  itself  on  its  monopoly  of  suffering. 
(Blushing  at  her  own  earnestness.)  I  can't  speak 
calmly  about  it,  for  it  has  brought  me  such  happi 
ness  to  see  things  in  the  natural  light  he  has  put 
them  in. 

Miss  KILBURN  (aside  to  PENELOPE)  :  Dear  child, 
he  has  helped  older  people  than  you  to  be  happy  when 
they  really  wanted  to  be  miserable. 

COREY  (looking  distrustfully  at  HUBBARD)  :  Of 
course  one  does  not  like  to  talk  publicly  about  one's 
best  friends ;  but  I  have  read  Howells  a  long  time, 
6 


and  I  have  gone  through  several  changes  of  opinion 
about  him. 

Miss  KILBURN  :  I  can  guess  how  you  felt.  Long 
ago  you  read  "The  Undiscovered  Country,"  and 
you  thought  that  the  legitimate  successor  of  Haw 
thorne  had  arrived  ? 

COREY  (smiling)  :  No ;  not  quite  that.  That  is 
the  feminine  version  of  it.  A  man  past  middle  life 
does  not  look  for  the  "successor"  to  anybody. 
This  whole  show  of  living  and  working  loses  conti 
nuity.  At  forty,  this  is  a  World  of  Chance  ;  at  six 
ty,  we  begin  to  believe  in  Providence  again  ;  and  at 
eighty,  I  hope  to  be  as  a  little  child  and  say  Adstim 
with  Colonel  Newcome. 

Miss  KILBURN  :  You  are  wandering  away  from 
"  The  Undiscovered  Country."  What  dfo/you  think 
then  ? 

COREY  :  Well,  fifteen  years  ago  I  thought  many 
things  that  I  should  not  dream  of  now.  For  one, 
I  thought  Ho  wells  was  a  romantic  novelist. 

Miss  KILBURN  :  Perhaps  he  was  then.  I  don't 
believe  that  the  change  is  all  in  us. 

COREY  :  I  am  always  a  good  decade  ahead  of  him 
in  age  ;  and  when  I  read  him  I  have  a  vivid  impres 
sion  of  looking  back  on  my  own  experiences  and  ob 
servations.  I  suspect  that  he  has  always  written  with 
the  utmost  fidelity  the  impressions  that  the  world  has 
made  on  him.  In  youth,  they  were  romantic,  as 
they  are  in  all  healthy  organisms  ;  in  early  maturity, 
they  had  a  little  of  that  cruelty  of  realism  which 
7 


comes  to  every  man  when  he  first  ceases  to  find  his 
own  sensations  the  chief  thing  in  life,  and  looks  at 
other  people  ;  and  now  in  middle  life,  in  the  light 
of  experience,  he  sees  more  than  ever  the  inherent 
pathos  in  living.  That  is  why  the  social  problem 
seems  to  be  the  supreme  thing  to  him  now. 

FULKERSON  (cutting  iii)  :  He's  on  the  right  tack. 
As  a  man  of  business  I  can  vouch  for  that.  What 
the  great  public  wants  to  read  about  is  its  own  misery, 
with  directions  for  hypnotizing  it  into  happiness. 
That  is  why  ' '  Looking  Backward  ' '  sold  ;  and  I  am 
told  that  "A  Hazard  of  New  Fortunes  "  is  the  most 
popular  of  Howells's  books,  for  the  same  reason. 

HUBBARD  :  No,  no,  my  boy.  You  are  too  mod 
est.  That  book  sold  because  you  are  in  it.  The 
average  American  likes  to  read  about  a  howling  busi 
ness  success,  and  you  filled  the  bill. 

COREY  (ironically  to  ANNIE  KILBURN)  :  I  have 
often  wondered  why  Mr.  Ho  wells  devoted  so  much 
time  and  space  to  unimportant  people.  One  does 
not  care  to  meet  them,  and  I  don't  see  why  one 
jfjk  should  care  to  read  about  them. 

'       -Jfl  •"-"tffc  Miss  KILBURN  :    Aren't 

^       they  a  big  part  of  the  big 
'""'%'      i  v  world,    Mr.   Corey?     Per- 

'  haps  it  is  just  a  phase  of  Mr. 
Howells's  scheme  to  hold 
the  mirror  up  to  reality. 

COREY      (meditatively)  : 
Perhaps.     But  one  has  such 


a  wide  choice  of  realities  in  this  world,  that  one  may 
like  to  spend  most  of  one's  time  with  realities  which 
are  of  importance. 

Miss  KILBURN  :  Yes  ;  if  you  happen  to  be  born  in 
that  environment.  Now,  I  confess  that  I  tried  living 
with  "  important  people  "  in  Europe  for  several  years, 
and  then  returned  to  the  commonplaces  of  Hatboro  ' 
with  positive  relief.  It  seems  to  me  that  I  get  an 
insight  of  finer  shades  of  life  in  that  provincial  at 
mosphere. 

COREY  (philosophically)  \  You've  caught  the  "  tail- 
feather  of  a  great  truth,"  Miss  Kilburn.  The  finest 
things  in  life  are  matters  of  the  affections,  and  some 
how  you  only  thoroughly  comprehend  them  in  the 
particular  environment  where  you  have  spent  your 
youth.  That  is  why  "Adam  Bede  "  and  "David 
Copperfield  ' '  are  the  truest  novels  of  their  authors. 

FULKERSON  (who  has  been  talking  with  PENELOPE 
and  HUBBARD)  :  Oh,  I  say,  what  are  you  so  serious 
about  over  there?  We've  been  pulling  Howells  to 
pieces,  and  Hubbard  says  he'll  try  to  work  us  in  his 
interview,  after  all,  as  a  sort  of  chorus.  Miss  Lapham 
says  that  most  of  the  girls  she  knows  are  down  on 
Ho  wells' s  novels  because  the  love-making  is  so  matter- 
of-fact. 

HUBBARD  :  Isn't  it  always  matter-of-fact  to  every 
body  except  the  victims  ? 

Miss  LAPHAM  :  Well,  when  we  read  a  novel  don't 
we  want  the  victim's  point  of  view? 

COREY  :     You  must  not  take  your  novels  so  seri- 
9 


ously,  my  dear.  The  woman  who  takes  her  fiction 
seriously  is  apt  to  take  life  frivolously.  Take  them 
half-and-half. 

HUBBARD  (cutting  in)  :   Ho  wells' s  views  of  love  and 
socialism  don't  interest  me  a  bit ;  but  I  want  to  give 
him  a  straight  tip   on   his  idea  of  journalism.      He 
doesn't  seem  to  realize  that  it  is  a  great  profession 
which  owes  a  big  duty  to  the  public  ;  and  that,  just  as 
lawyers,   doctors,    and    preachers  have   to  do   things 
which  are  very  unpleasant  to  some  of  the  parties  con 
cerned,  so  the  reporter  must,  in  the  line  of  duty,  do  the 
disagreeable  occasionally.     I've  had  to,  myself. 
COREY  (with  intention)  :     I  don't  doubt  it. 
HUBBARD  :   My  theory  is  that  the  newspaper  is  just 
as  important  in  keeping  the  world  straight  as  the  old 
,.^5    belief  in  future  punishment  was.     Most  peo 
ple  have  lost  all  fear  of  Hades,  but  they  are 
sure,  at  any  rate,  that  the  press  will  find  them  out.     I 
j   tell  you,  sir  (looking  at  COREY),  that  a  healthy  con 
science  isn't  a  circumstance  to  a  good,  live  newspaper 
in  restraining  evil  in  a  community. 

COREY  :  It  does  fight  the  devil  with  fire. 
HUBBARD  :  Why,  sir,  it  keeps  the  American  news 
paper-man  busy  running  down  the  wickedness  that  has 
been  inspired  by  the  American  novel.  I  never  wrote 
up  a  big  crime  that  I  did  not  find  the  suggestion  of  it 
in  a  novel  hidden  somewhere  among  the  criminal's 
baggage.  Fact ! 

FULKERSON  :      I  haven't  any  doubt  that  if  Hubbard 
were  given  his  dues  as  a  great  moral  force  he  would 
10 


be  either  the  president  of  a  City  Re 
form  Club  or  a  bishop.  _^ 

HUBBARD  :      A  bishop  is  a  good 
enough  job  for  me. 

WAITER  {passing  through  the  car)  : 
Dinner  is  ready  in  the  dining-car. 
First  call  to  dinner  !      (All  rise  to  go 
to  dinner.} 

Miss  KILBURN  (to  PENELOPE,  who 
is  standing  by  her)  :  Those  men  don't 
like  Mr.  Howells  because  he  sees  through 
the  pretences  with  which  they  bolster  up  their  vanity. 
I  suspect  that  even  Mr.  Corey  is  irritated  at  Howells's 
moral  earnestness.  In  Mr.  Corey's  world  manners, 
not  morals,  are  the  real  thing. 


ii 


HENRY  JAMES 


THE   HOUSEHOLD   OF   HENRY   JAMES 


THE  MASTER, Henry  St.  George,  novelist. 

PAUL  OVERT A  young  writer. 

Miss  FANCOURT A  worshipper  of  genius. 

DAISY  MILLER,  .  j  A    y°un&      African    from 

(      Schenectady,  N.  Y. 

SCENE:  The  library  and  work-room  0/"ST.  GEORGE,  in  the  rear 
of  his  London  house.  "  A  large  high  room,  withotit  windows, 
but  with  a  wide  skylight  at  the  top,  like  a  place  of  exhibition." 
The  walls  covered  with  book-shelves  arid  prints  ;  a  table  littered 
with  proofs  and  manuscripts  ;  a  large  leather  lounge,  on  which 
OVERT  is  seated  smoking.  ST.  GEORGE  is  pacing  back  and 
forth  on  a  strip  of  brilliant  red  carpet,  the  letigth  of  the  pol 
ished  floor. 


THE    MASTER  :      It    is  good   of  you   to   leave  the 
ladies  upstairs  to  drink  their  tea  alone,  and  to 
come  down  to  this  book-factory.     I  had  just  reached 
the  end  of  a  paragraph  and  wanted  a  smoke. 

OVERT  (earnestly)  :  It  is  a  great  privilege  for  me 
to  be  allowed  to  interrupt  you. 

THE  MASTER  :  No,  no,  my  boy  !  A  talk  with 
you  is  like  a  visit  from  one's  old  ideals.  You  see  the 
visions  that  I  saw  thirty  years  ago. 


OVERT  :     I  hope  mine  may  reach  as  fine  a  maturity. 

THE  MASTER  (looking  in  his  eyes)  :  You  may  say 
polite  things  upstairs  in  the  drawing-room,  but  down 
here  we  talk  to  each  other's  hearts,  honestly. 

OVERT  {flushing} :  You  know  I  admire  your 
achievements 

THE  MASTER  (interrupting)  :  We  talked  that  out 
once  before,  and  Henry  James  put  it  all  in  his  story, 
"  The  Lesson  of  the  Master."  What  a  wonderfully 
subtile  man  he  is  !  You  remember  how  unconcern 
edly  he  sat  over  there  by  the  hearthstone  while  we 
talked,  smoking  and  dreaming  as  we  thought,  but  all 
the  time  seeing  through  our  words  into  our  very 
hearts.  There  is  a  man  who  has  followed  his  Art  as 
I  would  have  you  follow  it.  Don't  waste  your  ad 
miration  on  this  Mess  of  Pottage  which  you  call  my 
success — this  forty  volumes,  and  fine  house,  and  car 
riages,  and  titled  friends  !  My  boy,  my  boy,  you 
know  better. 

OVERT  (critically  between  rings  of  smoke}  :  Yes,  I 
know  what  you  mean.  I  do  admire  the  way  James 
does  it.  It  is  so  very  well-bred,  so  even  in  finish,  so 
delicate  in  nuances.  (Smiling. )  Indeed  it  is  all  the 
other  adjectives  which  artists  use  in  a  studio  when 
they  are  talking  about  technic.  You  know  the  vo 
cabulary  !  Well,  that  is  Henry  James — technic, 
technic,  to  the  end  of  the  story.  But  I  want  some 
thing  more — I  want  life,  with  its  imperfections,  its 
unreasonableness,  its  lack  of  those  subtilties  which  Art 
spends  itself  upon. 

16 


THE  MASTER  (impatiently)  :  Please  don't  go  over 
all  those  pet  phrases  of  the  hot-blooded  young  man 
who  wants  to  indulge  his  senses  and  calls  it  "  study 
ing  life."  I  know  them  as  well  as  I  do  the  studio 
cant  about  technic.  I  did  not  say  that  you  could 
learn  everything  from  James.  But  you  can  learn  from 
him  the  possibilities  of  the  English  language  in  sep 
arating  emotions  which  are  classed  together  by  the 
untrained  observer.  Surely  you  have  been  astounded 
at  the  flexibility  of  his  phrases  ?  Haven't  you  learned 
from  them  that  our  language  is  delicate,  and  refined, 
as  well  as  virile  ? 

OVERT  :  I  have,  I  have  !  I  read  him  always  with 
sensations  akin  to  those  with  which  I  watch  my  own 
warm  breath  turn  to  wonderfully  delicate  traceries 
of  frost  on  a  window-pane.  I  follow  intently  the 
needle-points  of  the  crystals  as  they  shoot  across  the 
smooth  glass,  until  the  apparently  hap-hazard  lace- 
work  takes  a  definite  pattern — as  though  it  had  been 
prearranged  from  all  eternity.  Is  the  breath  of  life 
but  a  vapor  to  hang  for  a  few  moments  in  crystals  of 
frost,  and  then  melt  into  nothingness  ?  I  rouse  from 
my  reverie  chilled  to  my  heart.  And  that  is  reading 
Henry  James  ! 

THE  MASTER  :  Your  fancy  does  full  credit  to  your 
feeling.  What  you  do  not  see  now  is  that  your  sen 
sations  are  the  usual  chill  which  Youth  feels  in  con 
tact  with  Experience.  Ten  years  from  now  you  will 
begin  to  feel  the  surprising  pathos,  the  warm-blooded 
charity,  the  tolerance  of  human  eccentricity  behind 


this  crystal  art  which  chills  you.  Then  you  will  read 
"  The  Liar,"  "The  Middle  Years,"  "The  Pupil," 
with  tears  in  your  eyes. 

OVERT  {puzzled)  :  But  what  has  he  been  driving 
at  all  these  years  that  he  has  worked  so  faithfully  at 
his  art  ?  That  is  what  bothers  me.  Is  he  simply  do 
ing  it  for  the  sake  of  working  ? 

THE  MASTER  :  He  put  it  all  in  a  phrase  once 
which  means  more  the  longer  you  ponder  it.  The 
thing  which  interests  him  supremely,  which  he  makes 
it  his  mission  to  depict  with  his  facile  art,  is  the  im- 
mitigability  of  our  moral  predicament. 

OVERT  (cynically)  :  The  phrase  is  a  polysyllabic 
terror. 

THE  MASTER  (smiling)  :  But,  as  our  American 
friend  drinking  tea  upstairs  would  say,  "  It  gets  there 
every  time. ' '  The  tragedy  of  living  is  in  it — what  the 
philosophers  call  heredity,  environment,  predestina 
tion  and  all  the  other  abstractions — but  which  you 
and  I  know  as  the  never-ending  daily  tussle  with  those 
things  in  us  which  we  would  give  our  very  lives  to 
make  different.  James  sees  it  all  as  clearly,  as  pa 
thetically,  as  any  fiction-writer  of  his  generation. 
We  wonder  now  why  his  contemporaries  called  Thack 
eray  a  cynic  ;  I  suspect  that  our  grandsons  will  won 
der  still  more  why  we  have  called  James  cold  and  un 
sympathetic. 

OVERT  (listening  to  footsteps  on  the  stairs]  :  There 
come  the  young  women  !  Now  we  shall  have  new 
light  on  the  subject. 

20 


VOICES  (calling)  :      Please,  may  we  come  down  ? 
THE  MASTER:   If  you  don't  mind  solid  chunks  of 
smoke. 

OVERT  :     And  a  hot  discussion. 

(Enter  Miss  FANCOURT  and  DAISY  MILLER,  in  after 
noon  costumed) 

Miss  FANCOURT  (to  OVERT)  :     You  promised  to  go 
with  us  to  drink  tea  with  the  Princess  Casamassima. 

DAISY  MILLER  :     And  meet  a  lot  of 
artistic  and  social  freaks. 

Miss  FANCOURT  :  Henry  James  will 
be  there,  and  you  always  enjoy  his 
talk. 

OVERT  :      Oh,  yes,  his  talk  is  al 
ways  good. 

THE    MASTER   {explaining}: 
James  has  been  the  cause  of  our 
dispute.      Overt    thinks    he    is   a 
cold  and  unsympathetic  artist  (slyly), 
and    all    the   other  things    that    the 
Philistines  call  him. 

Miss  FANCOURT  (gushingly)  : 
How  can  you,  Mr.  Overt?  You, 
with  the  soul  of  an  artist  under 
your  hat ! 

DAISY  MILLER  (impertinent 
ly}  :  I  suspect  that  his  artist- 
soul  is  just  as  conventionally 
English  as  his  plug  hat. 

21 


"How  CAN  YOU,  MR.  OVERT?' 


Miss  FANCOURT  (my stifled}  :     What 
kind  of  hat  ? 

DAISY  MILLER  (laughing)  :     His 
plug,  dicer,  beaver,  tile — don't  you 
know  your  mother  tongue  ? 

OVERT  :  James  is  an  Ameri 
can,  but  he  does  not  speak  your 
language. 

DAISY  MILLER  (positively^  \ 
And  that's  what's  the  matter  with 
Mr.  James.  If  he  wrote  his  native 
language  we'd  read  him  more  over 
the  pond. 

THE  MASTER  :  I've  often  won 
dered  why  you  Americans  do  not 
more  appreciate  him. 

DAISY  MILLER:  Well,  I'll  tell 
you.  He's  lived  with  you  so  long 
that  we're  not  onto  his  curves. 
Do  you  catch  on  ?  His  trolley's  off  the  American 
wire.  ( The  others  look  at  her  and  at  each  other  in 
mute  astonishment, .)  Oh,  but  you  are  slow  at  learning 
the  lingo.  We  used  to  have  a  reading  club  in  Schenec- 
tady — the  girls  of  our  set — to  improve  our  minds,  you 
know.  Well,  when  we  had  finished  "  Barriers  Burned 
Away,"  "St.  Elmo,"  Farrar's  "  Life  of  Christ,"  and 
"  Molly  Bawn,"  one  of  the  girls,  a  regular  blue-stock 
ing  from  Boston  with  glasses  on  her  nose,  proposed 
that  we  read  Henry  James.  That  roused  my  dander, 
"  See  here,  girls,"  I  said,  "  if  you  want  to  turn  this 
22 


:  His  TROLLEY'S  OFF  THE  AMERICAN 
WIRE." 


into  a  circle  of  King's  Daughters  to  read  religious 
books  and  sew  for  the  heathen,  I'll  resign  at  once." 
The  Boston  girl  looked  shocked  and  said,  "  How  can 
you  be  so  rude.  Mr.  James  writes  the  purest  Boston 
English,  and  is  highly  approved  by  Charles  Eliot  Nor 
ton  and  the  Harvard  seniors."  (Sighing.}  Oh,  she 
made  me  tired.  "  Why  doesn't  he  come  to  Ameri 
ca  again  and  learn  something  besides  Bostonese  !  " 
I  said.  "We  don't  all  talk  like  prigs  or  vulgarians 
over  here  !  In  New  York  we're  refined  from  our 
bangs  to  our  boots,  and  don't  you  forget  it !  " 

THE  MASTER  (getting  control  of  his  face)  :  Thank 
you.  I  never  understood  why  James  was  unpopular 
in  America  till  I  met  you. 

DAISY  MILLER  (protesting)  :  Oh,  you  must  not  take 
me  for  a  fair  sample  of  an  American  girl.  I  had  to  go 
abroad  for  my  health  before  I  had  had  a  year  at  a  fin 
ishing  school  in  New  York.  They  put  a  polish  on  you 
there  in  which  you  can  see  to  comb  your  hair.  Mr. 
James  has  not  caught  on  to  the  fact  that  we're  getting 
mighty  civilized  in  the  States. 

THE  MASTER  (turning  to  Miss  FANCOURT)  : 
Come,  give  us  an  English  girl's  defence  of  him. 

Miss  FANCOURT  (with  enthusiasm)  :  He  satisfies  my 
longing  for  perfection  in  work.  There  is  never  any 
thing  in  his  stories  to  jar  my  taste.  When  he  treats 
a  disagreeable  subject,  he  does  it  as  a  gentleman  would 
talk  about  it  to  a  refined  woman — with  polite  phrases, 
delicate  metaphor,  and  a  humor  that  plays  about  it  all 
gently.  There  is  none  of  the  heat  or  prejudice  about 
23 


his  stories  which  is  so  often  evident  in  the  writings  of 
people  you  would  not  care  to  know.  When  I  have 
finished  one  of  Mr.  James's  stories  I  always  feel  that  I 
should  like  to  meet  him  in  the  alcove  of  a  library  and 
talk  about  it  all  with  him  as  though  it  were  true. 
(Starting.)  And  that's  what  I  hope  to  do  at  Princess 
Casamassima's.  I  want  to  ask  him  whether  he  did 
not  mean  "The  Real  Thing  "  to  be  a  satire  on  the 
artist's  point-of-view,  as  much  as  on  the  poor  dear 
gentleman  and  gentlewoman  who  tried  to  be  useful. 
(To  DAISY  and  OVERT.)  Come,  the  afternoon  is 
almost  over  ! 

(They  follow  her  through  the  portieres  after  adieus  to 
THE  MASTER.) 

THE  MASTER  (soliloquizing  as  he  turns  to  his  desk)  : 
Ah,  if  I  could  only  clothe  my  characters  with  gar 
ments  woven  with  James's  art  they  would  live  for  a 
century  or  two.  But  I  have  marketed  my  crude  in 
ventions  for  the  luxuries  of  a  London  establishment, 
for  the  pleasures  of  an  ever-present  success.  But  I 
know,  and  Overt  and  James  know  in  their  hearts,  that 
it  isn'  t  the  Real  Thing.  (  Taking  up  his  pen.)  Come, 
charlatan,  pick  up  your  fool's  wand  and  finish  your 
daily  tricks  ! 


24 


THOMAS   BAILEY   ALDRICH 


THE  HOUSEHOLD  OF 
THOMAS    BAILEY    ALDRICH 


MARJORIE  DAW,      .    .          ^  Only  dauShter  of  an  old  New  EnS- 

'.      land  family. 

JOHN  FLEMMING,     .     .     .     Of  New  York,  rich,  and  twenty-four. 
THE  BAD  BOY,     ....     Tom  Bailey. 


SCENE  :  The  broad  piazza  of  an  old  colonial  mansion,  with  gam- 
brel  roof  and  r ambling  extensions,  at  the  cross-roads  near  Rye, 
N.  H-  In  a  shady  corner  a  hammock  is  swung,  and  in  it  a  girl 
of  eighteen,  with  golden  hair  and  dark  eyes,  swaying  "  like  a 
pond-lily  in  the  golden  afternoon. "  In  a  wicker  chair,  very 
near  the  hammock,  is  JOHN  FLEMMING. 


MARJORIE  DAW  (indignantly)  :      To  think  that 
Mr.  Aldrich  dared  to  put  it  in  the  story  that 
there  wasn't  any  colonial  mansion,  any  piazza,  any 
Marjorie  Daw  ! 

JOHN  FLEMMING  :  I  believe  that  he  was  in  league 
with  Delaney  (who  must  have  been  in  love  with  you 
himself)  to  throw  me  off  the  track  and  make  me  give 
up  the  search  for  the  ideal  woman  I  loved. 

MARJORIE  (confidently)  :  He  don't  know  how 
steadfast  you  are. 

JOHN  (trying  to  appear  modest)  :      It  was  not  that 
exactly.     You  see   I  knew  prosaic  old  Delaney  too 
27 


well  to  believe  that  he  could  invent  a  girl  like  you 
out  of  whole  cloth.  I  was  sure  that  he  had  an  orig 
inal  in  his  mind's  eye,  so  I  took  rooms  at  the  Surf 
House,  and  drove  all  the  roads  and  by-ways  'round 
Rye  till  I  found  you. 

MARJORIE  (with  beaming  face)  :  And  this  is  bet 
ter  than  Mr.  Aldrich's  story  ? 

JOHN  {flattering)  :  He  did  not  half  do  you  jus 
tice.  (  The  hammock  swings  conveniently  near. ) 

MARJORIE  :  But  I  like  Mr.  Aldrich  and  his  sto 
ries  very  much,  John,  and  you  must,  too.  He  often 
comes  down  this  way  to  Stillwater  to  call  on  the 
Shackfords.  You  know  he  wrote  a  book  about 
them  and  that  awrful  murder  case  ? 

JOHN  (recollecting):  Oh,  yes!  ''The  Stillwater 
Tragedy."  Read  it  when  I  was  laid  up  with  my 
lame  leg ;  knew  Durgin  would  be  the  real  villain  be 
fore  he  had  spoken  ten  words.  That  is  no  kind  of  a 
detective  story.  If  you  want  the  real  thing  you 
ought  to  read  * '  The  Leavenworth  Case. ' ' 

MARJORIE  (severely)  :  You  New  York  men  are 
such  Philistines  !  Mr.  Aldrich  is  a  real  man  of  let 
ters.  He  would  not  stoop  to  detective  stories.  He 
writes  literature. 

JOHN  (hedging)  :  I  don't  doubt  it.  But  it  took 
something  more  than  mere  literature  to  make  me  for 
get  that  my  leg  was  aching. 

MARJORIE  (with  a  tremble  in  her  voice)  :     John,  if 
we  are  to  be  happy  together  you  must  never,  never 
speak  lightly  of  my  New  England  idols. 
28 


JOHN  (meekly)  :  All  right,  my  dear,  make  a  list 
of  them  and  I'll  worship  the  whole  lot — Emerson, 
Longfellow,  Hawthorne,  Lowell,  Whittier,  Holmes, 
Aldrich 

MARJORIE  (cutting  in)  :  Stop,  stop  !  Don't 
mention  anybody  else  in  the  same  breath  ! 

JOHN  (curtly)  :      Amen  ! 

(A  five  minutes'  indignant  silence,  and  an  affectionate 
reconciliation^) 

2Q 


MARJORIE  (in  her  instructive  manner}  :  If  you  are 
really  and  truly  sorry,  you  must  learn  to  appreciate 
Aldrich  fully,  as  I  do. 

JOHN  (resignedly)  :  Go  ahead,  please  !  I'm  in  a 
repentant  mood. 

MARJORIE  (laying  down  the  law]  :  You  must  un 
derstand,  first,  that  New  England  women  have  a  great 
admiration  for  Aldrich's  work,  because  so  much  of  it 
deals  with  New  England  people  and  scenery. 

JOHN  (who  has  been  allowed  to  smoke]  :  Queer, 
isn't  it?  You  are  never  tired  reading  and  writing 
about  yourselves.  Now  in  New  York  most  of  the 
men  and  women  I  know  would  rather  read  anything 
else  than  a  New  York  novel. 

MARJORIE  {petulantly)  :  There  are  so  few  of  them 
worth  reading. 

JOHN  (rising  to  the  occasion  on  rings  of  smoke]  :  I 
am  not  so  sure  of  that.  There  are  Banner,  Janvier, 
Davis,  Hibbard,  Bangs,  Matthews,  Hopkinson  Smith, 
Mrs.  Harrison,  and  Mrs.  Cruger — each  of  them  has 
written  a  good  story  or  two  about  New  York.  But  we 
don't  make  so  much  ado  about  that  sort  of  thing  as 
you  do.  We  have  a  host  of  other  things  to  interest 
us. 

MARJORIE  :  Oh,  I  know  all  that.  You  are  rank 
materialists,  and  are  never  worth  much  till  you  marry 
New  England  girls.  ( Coquettishly . )  It  isn't  a  bad 
combination. 

JOHN  (with  fervor)  :     You  bet  it  isn't  ! 

MARJORIE  (confidently}  :  What  fan  I'll  have  spir- 
30 


itualizing  you  !  I'll  begin  with  the  Aldrich  cure. 
First  of  all  you  must  read  "  The  Queen  of  Sheba." 
It's  a  love  story,  and  perhaps  you  are  in  the  mood  to 
appreciate  it.  Such  a  charming  story,  too  ! 

JOHN  (who  knows  a  great  deal  more  than  he  exhib 
its}  :  Let  me  see?  (Puff,  puff.*)  Oh,  yes,  I  re 
member  that — girl  escapes  from  a  lunatic  asylum, 
meets  the  hero  in  a  country  lane  and  claims  him  for 
her  own.  Interval ;  scene  shifted  to  Switzerland — 
same  man,  same  girl,  minus  the  lunacy  ;  love  with 
intensity,  but  man  made  miserable  by  apprehension 
of  a  return  of  the  aforesaid  madness.  Slow  fever — 
deathbed  scene  except  the  coup  de  grace  ;  miraculous 
recovery.  Family  physician  guarantees  a  perfect 
cure  of  the  lunacy.  Wedding  bells.  Curtain. 
(Puff,  puff.)  Sweet,  isn't  it  ? 

MARJORIE  (ready  to  shed  tears)  :  You  are  a  pro 
voking  old  cynic,  and  you  must  not  spoil  my  favorite 
stories.  "  The  Queen  of  Sheba  "  is  a  beautiful  idyl, 
and  the  things  you  have  suggested  are  merely  the 
framework  for  perfect  prose  and  charming  fancy. 

JOHN  (repentant)  \  I  know  it,  my  dear.  Aldrich 
is  an  artist  in  words.  (Confessing  his  duplicity.)  I 
often  read  his  poetry — over  and  over  again  for  the 
crystal  beauty  of  it.  There  is  never  a  halting  foot, 
never  a  stumbling  rhyme.  I  always  feel  when  I  have 
finished  one  of  his  poems  that  he  has  done  it  once  for 
all — polished  it  to  the  final  comma. 

MARJORIE  (gushingly)  :  You  dear  fellow — I  am 
not  to  marry  a  Philistine  after  all  ! 


JOHN  (teasing)  \  Well,  I'm  not  so  sure  of  that. 
I  draw  the  line  at  <  <  Baby  Bell. "  As  a  profane  friend 
of  mine  often  says,  "  No  dead  kids  in  my  literature, 
please. ' ' 

MARJORIE  (wiping  her  eyes)  :  Why  will  you  say 
such  disagreeable  things  ? — just  when  I  begin  to  hope 
for  you. 

JOHN  (making  if  up}  :  I  must  chaff  now  and  then, 
you  know.  You  may  praise  "  Wyndham  Towers," 
"Spring  in  New  England,"  "Friar  Jerome,"  and 
"  Pepita,"  all  you  wish,  and  I'll  agree  with  you. 

MARJORIE  (brightening)  :  Why,  those  are  his  very 
best  poems.  You  really  have  some  discernment. 

JOHN  (self-satisfied) :  Even  a  New  York  man 
knows  a  perfect  thing  of  its  kind  when  it  comes  his 
way.  When  I  read  Aldrich  I  think  of  rare  cameos 
and  intaglios. 

MARJORIE  :  There  is  less  of  handiwork  and  more 
natural  beauty  in  my  impression.  I  think  of  a  lovely 
opal  where  the  richest  tints  and  colors  play — all  the 
beauty  of  the  great  arch  of  the  sky,  when  the  au 
rora  waves  over  it,  caught  and  imprisoned  in  that 
little  gem. 

JOHN  (aside,  reflectively}  :  I  suppose  that  when 
you  really  arouse  a  New  England  girl  you  find  a 
poet.  (To  MARJORIE.)  But  you  have  not  mentioned 
the  best  story  of  all,  frum  a  man's  point  of  view — 
"  The  Story  of  a  Bad  Boy." 

MARJORIE.  Girls  don't  care  to  read  about  the 
pranks  of  bad  boys.  We  suffer  enough  from  them  in 
32 


real  life.  (A  handsome  young  man  on  horseback  turns 
up  the  driveway  toward  the  house, .)  There  is  the 
original  Bad  Boy  now  !  Don' t  you  know  Tom  Bailey, 
of  New  York,  the  distinguished  politician  and  editor  ? 
He  is  at  the  Surf  House.  {Greetings  and  introduc 
tions  when  BAILEY  has  dismounted.}  We  were  speak 
ing  of  you.  Mr.  Flemming  thinks  your  biography 
the  best  of  Mr.  Aldrich's  novels. 

BAILEY  (in  despair}  :  Can  I  never  live  down  that 
awful  tale  of  my  youth  !  Some  people  really  believe 
that  I  did  all  those  things.  I  think  I  should  have 
been  nominated  for  governor  last  June  if  a  rival  paper 
had  not  unearthed  what  it  called  my  "  Terrible  Re 
cord  as  a  Boy  in  Rivermouth." 

FLEMMING  (laughing}  :  I  remember ;  but  I  heard  a 
dozen  men  at  the  club  declare  that  they  would  like  to 
have  a  chance  to  vote  for  the  original  of  the  Bad  Boy. 
They  all  looked  upon  you  as  the  friend  of  their  youth. 
I  haven't  a  doubt  that  every  winter  a  wave  of  mid 
night  explosions  sweeps  over  the  villages  of  this  coun 
try.  It  means  that  the  next  crop  of  boys  has  been 
reading  the  "Story  of  a  Bad  Boy."  It  is  passed 
along  from  generation  to  generation  of  village  young 
sters  with  "Tom  Brown"  and  "Verdant  Green." 
That  is  true  immortality  for  an  author.  There  are  no 
books  we  love  so  long,  no  authors  we  remember  so 
kindly  as  those  we  read  and  delighted  in  when 
young. 

BAILEY  (with  mock  earnestness}  :     Then  I'm  con 
demned  to  go  down  to  posterity  as  the  terror  of  good 
33 


parents  and  correct  school-teachers.     I  am  even  mis 
trusted  by  the  village  police  everywhere  ! 

MARJORIE  (cutting in)  :  But  the  village  girls  won't 
love  you  the  less  for  it. 

FLEMMING  {judiciously}  :  Aldrich  did  one  very 
fine  thing  with  the  "  Bad  Boy;  "  he  annihilated  the 
prig  in  American  juvenile  literature  for  a  generation. 

MARJORIE  :  And  that's  almost  as  good  as  being 
the  delightful  poet  that  he  is.  (A  maid  appears  in  the 
doorway)  And  now  we'll  have  luncheon. 

{Exeunt. ) 


34 


FRANK   R.  STOCKTON 


THE  LADY  OR  THE  TIGER? 


THE  HOUSEHOLD  OF  FRANK  R.  STOCKTON 


THE  LADY,. 
THE  TIGER, 


(  One  of  the  fairest  maidens  at  asemi- 

(         barbaric  court. 

The  fiercest  beast  in  the  kingdom. 


SCENE  :  Two  exactly  similar  adjoining  rooms  hung  with  the  skins 
of  wild  beasts.  A  small  iron-barred  window  in  the  centre  of 
the  dividing  wall ;  heavily  padded  doors  lead  from  each  into  a 
huge  arena.  In  one  room — THE  LADY  ;  in  the  other — THE 

TIGER. 

TIME:    The  Present. 


THE  LADY  (rousing from  a  deep  sleep  on  a  divan 
covered  with  leopard  skins}  : 
H,  I  am   weary,   weary   of  this  waiting  !     Here 
must  I  stay  till  that  young  man  answers  the  co 
nundrum,  and  chooses  the  Lady  or  the  Tiger. 

THE  TIGER  (with  his  huge  paws  sticking 
through  the  iron  bars  of  the  window'}  :  Hello, 
there  !  You  needn't  make  such  a  fuss  about 
it ;  I'm  in  the  same  boat  with  you. 

LADY  (satirically)'.  But  you're  a  tiger,  and 
a  man-tiger  at  that.  You're  used  to  the  solitude 
of  the  jungle,  while  my  only  life  has  been  the  gay- 
ety  of  court.  Why  must  we  be  shut  up  here  all  these 
years  ? 

37 


'HEI.I.O,  THERE 


TIGER  (philosophically,  scratch 
ing  his  left  ear  with  his  right  paw}  : 
Well,  it's  all  done  for  a  good  cause 
— the   cause   of  literature.     The 
slave  who  brought  me  my  break 
fast  this  morning  said  that  he 
heard  the  king  remark  to  his 
|  daughter,  the  other  day,  that 
f  if  the  question  were  settled 
about  the  Lady  or  the  Tiger, 
Stockton's    occupation    as   a 
story- writer  would  be  gone. 

LADY  :      I  don't  see  why  ! 
TIGER  (viciously)  :     Women  never  do. 
LADY  (with  severe  dignity)  :      Perhaps  Your  Royal 
Bengal  Highness  can  enlighten  me  ? 

TIGER  :      It's  just  this  way  :   Every  time  Stockton 
publishes  a  new  book,  most  of  the 
people  in  the  kingdom  rush  to 
buy  it  to  see  whether  it  con 
tains   the  answer   to  the         ^ 
Lady  or  the  Tiger  co 
nundrum.    When  they 
don't  find  the  answer, 
they  keep   on  hoping 
and    buy    the    next 
book  ;  and  so  on  in 
definitely. 

LADY   (interested)  : 
It  isn't  a  bad  scheme. 

38 


'  OH,  I    AM    WEAKV,  WEARY    OF   THIS   WAITING  !  " 


TIGER  :     A  regular  lead-pipe  cinch.      It  does  not 

matter  what  he  writes,  the  people  are  bound  to  buy  it. 

LADY  :     Oh,  well,  they  get  their  money's  worth, 


"  THEY  KEEP  ON  HOPING  AND  BUY  THE  NEXT  BOOK." 

anyhow.  The  Nubian  maid  who  waits  on  me  always 
brings  me  his  new  books.  I  get  a  great  deal  of  fun 
out  of  them. 

TIGER  (cynically]  :  You  have  to  ;  you've  nothing 
else  to  do,  except  to  embroider  that  wedding-dress 
which  you  won't  have  a  chance  to  wear. 

LADY  (with  tears  in  her  eyes)  :  It's  mean  of  you  to 
bully  a  poor,  weak  woman.  You  are  like  all  the  men 
I  used  to  know  ;  they  are  half-tiger  in  their  disposi 
tions,  the  brutes. 

TIGER  (showing  his  teeth}  :     I  don't  feel  flattered 

39 


to   be   compared  with 
a   man.      Respectable 
tigers    always    defend 
their  women-folks  and 
children   to  their  last 
drop  of  blood.     Your 
men,  I  under 
stand,  general 


ly  desert   their 
women  under  fire, 
and    get    divorces 

and  "  legal  separa-       "You  NEVER  DO  ANYTHING  BUT  SMOKE  CIG- 

tions,"  and  break        ARETTES  AND  READ  Rn>ER  HAGGARD '" 
up  their  families,  and  let  their  cubs  shift  for  themselves. 
We  may  bully  our  tigresses  a  good  deal,  but  we  are 
not  that  bad  ! 

LADY  {conciliating  him*)  :  Well — you  have  a  pretty 
good  heart  when  one  gets  through  your  hide.  But  that 
is  tough  !  That  is  why  I  despair  of  ever  improving 
your  literary  taste.  So  far  as  I  can  see  through  the 
grating,  you  never  do  anything  but  brush  your  royal 
stripes,  smoke  cigarettes,  and  read  Rider  Haggard. 

TIGER  {with  a  leer*)  :  Well,  isn't  that  better  than 
reading  Stockton's  everlasting  conundrums? 

LADY  {patronizingly)  :   You  just  show  your  ignor- 
40 


ance  !  Mr.  Stockton  has  written  some  perfectly  beau 
tiful  tales  with  no  conundrums  in  them  at  all.  There 
is  ' '  Mrs.  Leeks  and  Mrs.  Aleshine. ' ' 

TIGER  (cutting  in)  :  I  guess  The  Dusantes  were 
the  conundrum  in  that  book  ! 

LADY  (protesting)  :  But  he  answered  that  in  the 
sequel.  Then  there  is  "  The  Late  Mrs.  Null  " 

TIGER  (with  a  fiendish  laugh)  :  The  biggest  co 
nundrum  of  the  lot  !  I  tell  you  Stockton  is  simply  a 
great  big  ? 

LADY  (pettishly)  :  I  won't  talk  to  you  any  more 
to-day,  unless  you  play  fair.  (Coaxingly.)  But  isn't 
"  Rudder  Grange  "  perfectly  splendid  ?  Come  now, 
you  must  admit  that  ! 

TIGER  (dubiously,  chewing  his  claws)  :  I'm  not 
saying  that  I  was  not  interested  in  that,  the  day  you 
poked  it  through  the  bars.  Pomona  and  Euphemia, 
and  the  canal-boat,  are  great  fun.  But  the  men  are 
such  awful  idiots  !  There  may  be  men  like  those, 
but  I  never  knew  a  genteel  tiger  who  was 
such  a  fool. 

LADY    (brightening  up)  :     And    you 
did   enjoy  reading   about   Pomona's 
daughter,    and    the    baby    borrowed 
from   New   Dublin,    and   Lord  Ed 
ward  ? 

TIGER  (reluctantl))  :  Oh,  yes  ! 
But  they're  not  a  patch  on  "  King 
Solomon's  Mines." 

LADY    (in    despair)  :     You    are 


'$, 


such  a  bloodthirsty  creature — like  a  real  man.  The 
only  way  to  lead  a  man  clear  through  a  book  is  with 
a  trail  of  gore.  Why  can't  you  appreciate  nice, 
quiet,  gentle  humor,  full  of  good-will  and  sunshine, 
like  Mr.  Stockton's  ?  I  don't  believe  he  ever  spoiled 
a  page  of  a  book  with  a  grewsome  or  disagreeable 
image.  That  is  why  we  women  read  so  much  of 
him.  He  soothes  our  nerves. 

TIGER  (maliciously}  :  That's  the  business  of  pills 
— not  literature. 

LADY  (indignantly)  :  You  are  incorrigible,  and  I 
won't  talk  to  you.  Go  away  from  that  window  ! 

TIGER  (diplomatically]  :  Come,  my  dear  lady,  I 
have  a  great  scheme  to  propose  to  you — a  final  solu 
tion  of  the  conundrum  of  the  Lady  or  the  Tiger  ! 

LADY  (resignedly]  :  All  right ;  I'll  listen.  Any 
thing  is  better  than  staying  here  longer. 

TIGER  :  I'm  glad  to  hear  you  say  that,  for  you'll 
be  sure  to  accept  my  plan.  You  know  that  every  day 
at  twelve  o'clock,  for  ten  years,  that  young  man  who 
loved  the  princess  is  brought  into  the  arena  to  choose 
one  of  these  two  doors — the  Lady  or  the  Tiger. 
Well,  the  king  and  the  law  can't  compel  him  to 
choose  till  he's  ready,  and  he  won't  be  ready  till  he 
sees  a  perfectly  untroubled  smile  on  the  princess's 
countenance  when  she  points  out  the  door.  Do  you 
follow  me  ? 

LADY  :  Perfectly.  For  ten  years  he  has  been 
afraid  to  trust  her  to  point  out  the  door.  And  if  he 
knows  her  disposition  as  well  as  I  do  he  never  will 
42 


trust   her.      She'd   rather  have   him  die   than  marry 
me ! 

TIGER  (with  joy")  :  That's  it,  exactly.  What  I 
have  to  propose  gets  around  that  beautifully.  You 
see,  these  bars  are  near  enough  together  to  keep  me 
from  jumping  through,  but  they  are  far  enough  apart 
for  a  petite  woman  like  you  to  crawl  through.  Now, 
if  you  will  kindly  put  that  hassock  under  the  window, 
and  stand  on  it,  I'll  pull  you  through  with  my  paws. 
Then  I'll  gently  eat  you — you  are  pretty  enough  to 
eat,  and  I'll  be  very  nice  about  it  ;  I  shan't  even 
wrinkle  your  gown.  To-morrow  morning,  when  the 
Nubian  maid  comes,  she'll  find  your  cell  empty,  and 
will  immediately  report  to  the  princess.  The  prin 
cess  will  keep  it  to  herself,  and,  at  noon,  when  the 
young  man  is  brought  into  the  arena,  she  will  joyfully 
point  toward  your  door,  which  he  will  open  with  a 
great  show  of  bravery.  Of  course  you  will  not  be 
there,  and  the  king  will  think  that  the  gods  have  set 
tled  the  question,  for  there  won't  be  any  traces  of 
you  ;  and  then  he  will  order  that  I 
be  released  in  my  native  jungles, 
and  that  the  young  man  and 
the  princess  be  immediately 
married.  There  you  are, 
everybody  pleased  and 
happy,  and  the  great 
conundrum  solved  ! 

LADY     (hurling    the 
hassock    at    the     win- 


dow}  :  You  horrid,  horrid  creature !  You  must 
have  got  that  idea  from  one  of  Rider  Haggard's  awful 
books  ! 

TIGER  :     Meouw — wow — wow  ! 


44 


RICHARD   HARDING   DAVIS 


THE  HOUSEHOLD  OF 
RICHARD   HARDING   DAVIS 

VAN  BIBBER A  gentleman  of  leisure. 

(  Devoted    to   society   and   good 
ELEANORB  CUYLER,   .    .     . 

works. 

THE  OTHER  WOMAN,      .     .      Quite  "  impossible"  in  OUR  SET. 

\  A  young  tough,  with  good  im- 
GALLEGHER 

(      pulses. 

SCENE  :  A  Green  car  on  Broadway  above  Twenty -third  Street  ; 
time,  two  o'clock  on  an  August  afternoon.  The  streets  are  al 
most  deserted.  The  only  occupant  of  the  car  is  a  tastefully 
dressed  young  woman  who  is  absorbed  in  reading  a  letter. 


(Enter  VAN  BIBBER,  puffing  a  little.} 

HARMED  to  catch  a  glimpse  of  you 
town  *n  midsummer;  was  wait- 

a  *"ew  nours>  °n  my  way  fr°m 

/  Newport,  to  hear  from  my  yacht 
which  is  somewhere  between  here  and 
Oyster  Bay.  Caught  sight  of  your  pro 
file  in  the  car  window  and  ran  for  it.  Awfully  jolly 
to  have  the  town  all  to  ourselves  like  this.  Account 
for  yourself,  please  ? 

Miss  CUYLER  :      I  came  down  to  consult,  for  a  few 
47 


hours,  with  the  girls  at 
the  College  Settlement 
on  Rivington  Street. 
You  know  I  am  on  the 
Advisory  Committee, 
and  we  occasionally 
have  difficult  questions 
to  solve;  they've  put 
an  unusually  hard  one 
to  me  in  this  letter. 

VAN  BIBBER  :  Sorry 
I  can't  offer  to  help 
you  ;  but  I  always  mix 
things  up.  No  head  for 
(  Grasping  for  an  idea.)  I 
have  it,  hah,  hah.  Ask  our  friend  Dickey,  hah,  hah. 
He  is  always  giving  the  girls  good  advice. 

Miss  CUYLER  :      Oh,   is   Mr.   Davis  in   town  ?     I 
thought  he  was  abroad. 

VAN  BIBBER  :  He  was  ;  just  arrived  yesterday  on 
the  Paris.  No  end  of  new  togs — lovely  coaching 
coat  that  touches  his  heels — beautiful  collars  with  a 
sheer  to  them  like  a  racing  yacht — a  new  shade  in 
gloves,  and  all  that  sort 
of  thing. 

Miss  CUVLER  :  I  don't 
doubt  he  is  stunning,  but 
that  won't  solve  my  diffi 
culty. 

VAN  BIBBER  (showing 


fine  questions  of  morals. 


1 


his  disappointment)  :     I  thought  you  were  one  of  his 
disciples  ? 

Miss  CUYLER  :      I  have  read   all  his  stories,  even 
the  one  about  myself.     {Looking  quiz 
zically  at  VAN    BIBBER.)      Do    you 
think   he  has  quite  done  us  justice, 
Mr.  Van  Bibber  ? 

VAN   BIBBER   (a   little    confused}  : 
Oh,  I  say,  you  must  not  tease.     I'm 
not  the  man  he  put  in  those  stories, 
really  now — a  mere  coincidence  in 
names.     You  don't  think  I'd  do  that 
ridiculous  "  swan-boat  "  business,  do 
you  ?     Never  took  so  much   trouble 
for  anybody  in  my  life,  never. 

Miss  CUYLER  :  I  am  not  so  sure  of 
that.  You  are  more  of  a  man  than 
you  like  most  people  to  think. 

VAN  BIBBER  (laughing)  :  Chaff — more  chaff — 
you're  always  chaffing  me.  {Confidentially '.)  But 
frankly  now,  Miss  Cuyler,  I'm  not  the  sort  of  a  cad 
he  put  in  those  stories,  am  I  ?  I  don't  pose  as  such 
a  dreadfully  superior  person,  do  I,  and  patronize  peo 
ple  who  are  less  lucky  than  I  am  ? 

Miss  CUYLER  (sincerely)  :  No,  no  ;  you  are  never 
that.  The  only  thing  I  don't  like  about  you  is  your 
accent,  and  that's  improving.  Where  did  you  pick 
it  up  ? 

VAN  BIBBER  (lioncstly)  :     In  England.     Thought 
it  was  the  real  thing,  and  have  just  found  out  that  it 
49 


is  cockney.  {Ingenuously.'}  I  say,  now — you — you 
don't  mind  my  telling  you  thatj'^  are  nicer  than 
the  girl  in  Dickey's  story  ? 

Miss  CUYLER  (with  a  sidelong  glance}  :  I've  al 
ways  known  that.  We  New  York  girls  are  not  half 
the  prigs  he  takes  us  to  be.  One  might  think  from 
his  stories  that  we  are  a  combination  of  gorgeous 
frocks  and  intense  sentiments — a  sort  of  virtuous  Ca- 
mille,  if  you  can  imagine  that  type. 

VAN  BIBBER  :  Horribly  disagreeable  type  to  live 
with — always  want  to  know  the  reason  Why  for  every 
action.  Dramatize  their  emotions  and  their  friends, 
and  want  you  to  live  up  to  their  play.  But  you 
are 

Miss  CUYLER  {cuffing  in}  :  Oh,  I  know.  We  are 
sensible  enough.  The  New  York  girl  is  the  product 
of  very  practical  conditions.  It  is  in  the  blood. 
Our  fathers  may  have  inherited  their  wealth  but  our 
grandfathers  made  it,  and  most  of  them  in  a  very 
humble  way.  That  sort  of  thing  isn't  forgotten  in  a 
generation. 

VAN  BIBBER  :  Most  of  the  girls  I  know  are  good 
fellows. 

Miss  CUYLER  :  They  have  to  be,  or  their  brothers 
would  make  their  lives  miserable. 

VAN  BIBBER  :  But  Dickey  looks  at  you  through  a 
kind  of  literary  atmosphere.  His  stories  are 

Miss  CUYLER  (interrupting]  :  "  New  York  from 
a  Car  Window  "  would  be  a  good  title  for  them. 

VAN   BIBBER  (a  little  cynically*}  :      Next  season  I 


suppose  we'll  have  "  London  from  a  Car 
Window,"  and  then  Paris,  and  so  on 
around  the  world. 

Miss  CUYLER  :      Come  now.     Aren't 
we  a  little  cruel  to  one  of  our  best 
friends?     He  has  a  wonderfully 
good  narrative  style,  at  any  rate, 
and  he  never  wastes  words  in  tell 
ing  a  story. 

VAN    BIBBER  :     Yes ;    and    I  

don't  think  he  is  ever  dull.     You  -'*>'•*' 

know   he  sees  things — and   that's   a          \v,    :  •  \ 
good  deal. 

Miss  CUYLER  (meditatively}  :      He  sees    / 
a  great  deal  and  he  has  an  eye  for  the 
dramatic  effect  of  things.      Color  and  composition 
are  his  literary  weapons. 

VAN  BIBBER  :  And  very  few  use  them  so  well. 
Most  of  our  story-writers  simply  think  they  are  think 
ing. 

Miss  CUYLER  (glancing  out  of  the  car  window 
toward  a  corner  of  the  street)  :  Do  you  see  that 
woman  in  half  mourning,  standing  on  the  crossing 
and  waiting  for  this  car  ?  That  is  to  be  the  answer 
to  my  question  from  the  College  Settlement. 

VAN  BIBBER  (who  knows  the  town)  :  By  Jove, 
that  is  the  Other  Woman  of  Dickey's  story,  on  ac 
count  of  whom  our  friend  Miss  Ellen  threw  over 
Latimer.  Where  did  you  meet  her  ? 

Miss   CUYLER  :      Down   at   the   Settlement   a  few 


months  ago.      She  is  absorbed  in  good  work  of  that 
kind.      Run  along  now,  and  let  me  talk  with  her. 

VAN  BIBBER  (going  out  as  the  car  stops.  Under  his 
breath)  :  Whew  !  To  think  that  the  dashing  Birdie 
Benson  should  have  taken  to  the  Church  ! 

{Enter  THE  OTHER  WOMAN,  who  is  recognized  by 
Miss  CUYLER.      They  sit  together  and  talk.) 

Miss  CUYLER  :  The  girls  have  written  to  me  that 
you  want  to  join  in  our  work  actively,  and  I  am  on 
my  way  to  talk  with  them  about  it. 

THE  OTHER  WOMAN  :  That  is  my  errand  also, 
and  I  am  glad  that  I  met  you  here  alone  where  I  can 
make  an  explanation.  I  don't  want  to  go  into  this 
work  while  you  have  a  false  impression  in  your  mind 
about  me. 

Miss  CUYLER  :     Your  frankness  wins  me. 

THE  OTHER  WOMAN:  I  need  all  of  your  good 
will,  oh,  more  than  you  can  imagine.  You  must 
know  first  that  I  am  not  what  you  think  me.  I  am 
not  a  widow  ;  I  am  not  even  a  wife.  (With  hesita 
tion.)  I  came  from  a  home  of  refinement  in  a  coun 
try  village.  It  is  the  old  story  of  a  trusting  girl  de 
ceived  by  the  glib  phrases  of  a  city  man  of  a  certain 
type.  My  evil  genius  was  a  man  of  your  own  circle 
—handsome,  plausible,  almost  eloquent.  He  has 
the  fatal  faculty  of  deceiving  himself  as  easily  as 
he  deceives  others.  We  were  very  happy  for  a  time 
in  a  fool's  Paradise,  until  he  met  a  young  woman  in 
52 


•-  • 


THE  OTHER  WOMAN  OF  DICKEY'S  STORY. 


society,  the  daughter  of  a  bishop,  whom  he  thought 
worthy  of  his  superior  qualities.  Then  he  came  to 
me  with  one  of  his  canting  sermons  about  his 
"  duty  to  himself,  his  family,  and  society," 
and  threw  me  over  like  a  toy  of  which  he 
was  tired.  He  really  loved  me  sincerely, 
b.  too. 

Miss  CUYLER  (aside)  :     I 
always  thought 
that    Latimer's 
remarks  to   the 
bishop    in    his 
study  were  sol 
emn    nonsense, 
and  now  I  know 
it.   You  can  trust 
a  woman  like 
Ellen  for  seeing 
through   a  sham 
every  time. 

THE  OTHER  WOMAN  (continuitig)  :  The  rest  of  my 
story  is  very  short,  but  it  is  the  worst.  All  my  good 
impulses  were  dried  up  by  his  cruelty,  and  I  plunged 
into  a  world  of  which  you  do  not  even  dream,  and 
led  a  life  that  gained  me  the  nickname  of  the  "  Dash 
ing  Birdie  Benson."  But  one  cannot  escape  from 
the  good  influences  of  the  home  of  one's  youth,  and 
for  a  year  now  they  have  been  drawing  me  to  better 
things. 

Miss  CUYLER  :     You  poor  child.     I  am  sorry  for 
55 


you  with  all  my  heart.  You  must  go  away  from  this 
city  where  your  old  career  will  surely  find  you  out. 
I'll  discover  a  way  out  of  it  all. 

{Enter  newsboy  with  papers. ) 

GALLEGHER  :  Poypers  !  Here's  yer  evenin'  poy- 
pers  !  Telegram,  Nooes,  Wort ,  an'  Sim  ! 

Miss  CUYLER  (scriitinizingly)  :  Aren't  you  Mr. 
Davis' s  friend,  Gallegher,  who  caught  the  murderer 
over  in  Philadelphia  ? 

GALLEGHER  (with  a  grin)  :  Yep;  I'm  from  Phil- 
lie.  It's  too  slow  a  town  for  me.  But  that's  a  lot 
of  guff  he's  been  a-givin'  ye,  about  me  an'  the  bruis 
ers.  I  got  onto  the  bloke  wid  only  tree  fingers  to 
his  hand,  but  I  didn't  do  no  cry-baby  and  holy 
cherub  act  when  the  coppers  chased  me  into  the 
Press  office.  I  slid  up  to  the  managing  editor  and 
said,  "  Here's  Mr.  Dwyer's  copy.  Rush  it  quick. 
And  say,  cully,  can't  ye  give  me  a  box  of  cigarettes 
for  bringing  it  so  soon?"  That's  all  that's  uv  it. 
See  !  (Exit,  singing)  EXTRY.  Full  account  of  the 
Torn  ad  y  ! 

(Conductor  yells  "Riving ton  Street,"   and  both    ex 
eunt.  ) 


F.  MARION   CRAWFORD 


THE  HOUSEHOLD  OF  F.  MARION  CRAWFORD 

I  A  learned  Persian,  dealer  in 

MR-  IsAACS (      precious  stones. 

RAM  LAL An  "  adept  "  in  Buddhism. 

RUSSELL  VANBRUGH,     ...     A  New  York  lawyer. 
PRINCESS  SARACINESCA,     .     .     Of  the  Italian  nobility. 

SCENE  :  The  deck  of  a  P.  &*  O.  steamer  bound  for  Bombay ,  on  the 
Indian  Ocean  ;  a  smooth  sea,  a  gently  moving  warm  breeze,  and 
a  brilliant  tropical  night.  People  of  all  nationalities  are 
promenading  the  decks,  and  amidships  there  is  music  and  danc 
ing.  In  the  shelter  of  the  deck-cabins  aft,  a  little  group  is 
seated  apart  in  earnest  discussion. 

PRINCESS  SARACINESCA  :     Oh  the  beauty  of 
this  tropic  night  !     It  is  the  sky  of  Italy  with  the 
stars  intensified. 

VANBRUGH  :     More  volts  of  electricity  in  the  heav 
enly  lamps. 

ISAACS  :     You  Americans  measure  beauty  in  com 
mercial  terms.      I  never  knew  but  one  of  you  who 
was  an  idealist — and  that  was  years  ago  in  Simla. 
VANBRUGH  :     What  is  the  name  of  the  Prodigy? 
ISAACS  :     Marion  Crawford — a  journalist  in  India 
when  I  knew  him,  but  now  a  popular  novelist.      For 
years  he  has  sent  me  all  his  books. 
59 


PRINCESS  :      I  often  meet  him  in  Rome • 

VANBRUGH  :     And  I  in  New  York. 

ISAACS  :  And  each  of  us  no  doubt  finds  him  per 
fectly  at  home — a  true  cosmopolite,  a  citizen  of  the 
world.  He  is  an  excellent  example  of  my  theory  that 
the  more  a  man  sees  and  knows,  the  more  of  an  ideal 
ist  he  becomes.  Such  a  man  sees  widely  different 
realities  standing  for  an  expression  of  the  same  men 
tal  or  spiritual  truth.  They  become  to  his  clear  eye 
the  mere  foliage  of  truth  which  varies  with  the  acci 
dents  of  climate,  environment,  nationality.  The 
great  writers  of  romance,  in  poetry  or  prose,  have 
been  always  men  of  wide  knowledge  of  the  world — 
Scott,  Dumas,  Hugo. 

60 


VANBRUGH  :  But  a  New  England  school-mistress 
whose  horizon  is  bounded  by  her  village  streets  will 
always  write  realistic  stories. 

ISAACS  (waving  his  hand  toward  the  promc-     Jjft 
naders)  :      How  can  any  one  look  at  this  mov-      &>?? 
ing  throng — the  nations  of  the  world  in  mi 
crocosm — and  doubt  that  the  essence  of         ,.v* 
life  is  the  unseen — the  ideal  !     I  have  || 

seen  into  the  heart  of  yonder  Buddhist,       , »  ? 
in  his  strange  robe,  and  know  that  T.^^.^,/  "- 

it  has  throbbed  with  like  aspi-     ,         L  &•"  , 
rations  to  mine.     When  you       ^J    .jig': 
find  what   you   once  thought   <-A  *?• . 
to  be  a  mere  vision  of  your 
imagination    equally    domesticated  ^'£^     ^ 

under  the  fez  of  a  Turk,  the  tur 
ban  of  a  Hindoo,  and  the  pot  hat  of  an  Englishman, 
you  begin  to  suspect  that  the  things  which  are  seen  are 
temporal,  and  those  which  are  unseen  are  eternal.  That 
is  what  Crawford  has  put  into  his  romances — the  mar 
vellous  heart  of  man  of  whatever  nation  or  tongue, 
torn  with  the  same  longings  and  desires,  soothed  with 
the  same  hopes.  And  yet  learned  men  are  saying 
that  this  is  not  the  age  of  romance  ! 

PRINCESS  (earnestly}  :  As  I  have  grown  older  and 
have  had  leisure  to  read  and  travel  more,  it  has  been 
driven  home  to  me  that  what  we  call  Romance  is 
the  highest  realism.  The  very  wonders  of  industry, 
science,  invention,  which  we  call  the  spirit  of  the  age, 
are  the  romantic  dreams  of  strong  men  made  visible. 
61 


VANBRUGH  :     But  that  does  not  justify  the  impos 
sible  romances  of  Crawford.     A   cynical   friend   of 
mine  calls  them   "  fairy  tales  for  grown-up 
children." 

PRINCESS  :  Why  "  fairy  tales  !  " 
What  is  every-day  New  York  to 
you — the  telephone,  the  phono- 
1  graph,  the  Elevated,  the  Brooklyn 
If  Bridge — would  surpass  the  wildest  dreams 
of  impossible  things  that  ever  entered 
the  head  of  that  Arab  trader  who  came 
on  board  at  Aden.  Go  tell  him  that  at 
home  you  talk  to  a  friend  a  thousand 
miles  away  in  a  whisper,  and  hear  the  voice  of  your 
father  who  is  dead  repeated  from  a  waxen  spool  ! 
He  will  laugh  in  your  face — but  will  add  that  if  you 
want  to  hear  a  true  story  of  marvellous  things  he  will 
tell  you  the  tale  of  Aladdin's  Lamp. 

VANBRUGH  :  I  don't  object  to  one  of  Crawford's 
rattling  stories  when  I  want  to  be  amused  after  a  hard 
day  in  court — but  then  you  must  not  ask  me  to  take 
that  sort  of  thing  seriously.  (Smiling.*)  I  don't  be 
lieve  he  takes  it  seriously  himself. 

ISAACS  :  That  is  beside  the  point.  What  I  have 
been  trying  to  say  is  that  the  so-called  Romantic  at 
titude  toward  life  is  nearer  truth  than  the  Realistic. 
When  Crawford  writes  romances  he  is  attempting  a 
higher  form  of  art  than — say  Zola. 

PRINCESS  :     The  striking  thing  to  me  in  his  work 
is  that,  while  his  attitude  toward  life  is  romantic,  his 
62 


stage-setting  is  always  realistic.  Saracinesca  and  I 
have  been  everywhere  in  recent  years,  and  we  have 
found  the  descriptions  in  Mr.  Crawford's  books  al 
most  photographic — Constantinople,  Munich,  Prague, 
Arabia,  London,  New  York,  and  our  dear  Italy. 

ISAACS  :  I  am  glad  to  hear  you  say  that.  Ro 
mance  is  no  excuse  for  lazy  or  inaccurate  observa 
tion.  The  best  romancers  are  as  accurate  as  the  realists. 

PRINCESS  :  Stevenson,  Bourget,  Loti,  Kipling — 
for  other  examples  at  the  present  time — all  travelling 
the  world  over  for  impressions  of  men  and  things  ! 

VANBRUGH  :  I  care  little  for  your  distinctions  of 
schools,  method,  and  attitude.  You  are  simply  talk 
ing  the  slang  of  art.  But  as  a  practical  man  with 
some  experience  in  sifting  the  motives  of  men, 
I  have  often  found  Crawford's  novels  defi 
cient  in  character-drawing.  His  men  are 
all  enormously  rich,  clever,  and  handsome  ; 
his  women  are  surpassingly  beautiful,  and  / 
they  all  speak  in  the  florid  language  of  the  \ 
melodrama. 

ISAACS  :  I  prefer  the  language  which 
clearly  mirrors  the  thought,  even  though 
florid,  to  the  linguistic  horrors  which  some 
of  your  writers  have  put  in  what  I  believe 
you  call  dialect  stories.  I  picked  up  a  vol 
ume  of  them  in  the  hotel  reading-room  at 
Cairo  the  other  day.  It  is  my  good  fortune 
to  know  something  of  twenty  languages  —  and  yet 
never  have  I  come  across  anything  so  strange  as  those 
63 


LOTI. 


tales.     A  young  American  girl  came  looking  for  the 

book  which  she  had  forgotten,  and  I  asked  her  to  tell 

me  what  it  was.      "  My  Royal 

-^aZh         Princelet,"   she  said,  with  a 

y  '         '  ^     iF^SfifC' 

[  '  »'  '  -ity  N     _X^~-          bewitching  smile,  "  we  call 

that   the  great,    native 
American  literature,  in 
the   States.     We  are 
\  proud  of  it,  and  each 

y  ^'Jn.-.  section  of  the  coun- 

••"""  --'"^fet. 

try    booms    its    own 
dialect  poet  or  nov 

elist  along  with  its  wheat-acreage  and  output  of  pig- 
iron." 

VANBRUGH  {laughing)  :  Does  your  philosophy  ac 
count  for  the  American  girl  ? 

ISAACS  (with  a  puzzled  look}  :     I  meet  her  every 
where  in  my  travels,  and  she  is  more  mysterious  to 
me  than  my  Buddhist  teacher  and  seer,  Ram  Lai. 
(  The  moon  rises  slowly  out  of  the  water,  and  as  its 
Jirst  rays  break  over  the  side  of  the  vessel  an  aged 
Buddhist  appears.  ) 

RAM  LAL  :  Peace,  Abdul  Hafiz  !  You  spoke  my 
name. 

ISAACS  :  Aleikum  Salaam,  Ram  Lai  !  My  friends 
and  I  have  been  talking  about  the  young  American 
who  once  was  with  us  in  the  Himalayan  Mountains  on 
a  perilous  mission. 

RAM  LAL  :     A  brave  man,  my  brother,  and  atelier 
of  strange  tales  which  I  have  since  read  in  books  on 
64 


the  market-stalls  of  Cairo,  Suez,  and 
Bombay.  I  should  rather  read  his  books  than  argue 
with  him,  for  I  found  him  something  of  a  sophist. 
As  I  have  often  said,  "  Life  is  too  short  to  argue." 

ISAACS  :  But  you  did  not  find  his  books  sophisti 
cal  ? 

RAM  LAL  :  Nay,  my  brother,  for  I  have  found  in 
them  the  sincerity  that  dwells  only  in  the  heart.  Now 
the  heart  of  man  is  the  seed-ground  for  the  flowers  of 
the  spirit.  In  it  are  planted  those  aspirations  which 
under  a  quickening  influence  may  spring  into  vigor 
ous  life.  But  wonderful  as  the  heart  is  in  its  possi 
bilities,  it  still  belongs  to  the  earth,  and  our  friend's 
beautiful  stories  are  of  the  earth.  The  fidelity,  the 
heroism,  the  beauty  in  them  are  of  the  world,  worldly. 
The  idealism  in  them  is  artistic  idealism,  and  has 
nothing  akin  to  the  highest  idealism  which  is  essen- 
65 


tially  moral.  Higher  than  the  laws  of  romance  are 
the  laws  of  Nature,  which  are  the  laws  of  Buddha. 
The  essence  of  them  is  not  pleasure,  or  beauty,  or  fi 
delity  to  the  affections,  but  Self-sacrifice.  (As  a  fleecy 
cloud  obscures  the  moon,  he  fades  away)  :  calling 
Peace  be  with  you  ! 

ISAACS  :     And  with  you.      Peace  ! 

(All  arise  in  silence  and  start  below.) 

VANBRUGH  (aside]  :  That  old  boy  talks  like  a 
transcendental  summer-school  of  Philosophy.  They 
might  appreciate  him  at  Concord,  but  he's  one  too 
many  for  me.  I'm  rather  glad  Crawford  isn't  chuck 
full  of  "  moral  idealism."  Think  I'll  go  below  and 
finish  "  Marion  Darche  "  before  I  turn  in. 

(Exit.) 


66 


RUDYARD   KIPLING 


THE  HOUSEHOLD  OF  RUDYARD  KIPLING 

"Show  me  the  face  of  Truth,"  the  Sahib  said — 
"  Show  me  its  beauty,  before  I'm  dead  !  " 
"  Look  !  "  said  the  priest,  "  with  unflinching  eyes  ; 
"  This  is  the  World,  and  not  Paradise. 
"  Look  !     It  is  wicked,  and  cruel,  and  strong,  and  wise  !  " 

— A  Buddhist  Seer. 

MRS.  HAUKSBEE,  \  Admired  bY  men  and  feared 

by  women. 

CAPTAIN  GADSBY Of  the  Pink  Hussars. 

Miss  THREEGAN, Engaged  to  Captain  Gadsby. 

TERENCE  MULVANEY,   .     .     .      j  Private  in  B  Company  of  the 

Old  Regiment. 

SCENE:  Veranda  of  the  Threcgan  house  at  Simla.  A  fine  view 
of  the  Simla  hills  and  the  valley  below.  Miss  THREEGAN  is 
seated  in  a  long  chair,  her  eyes  on  the  distant  hills  and  her 
thoughts  in  England.  In  her  lap  an  open  letter  of  many  sheets, 
bearing  the  London  post-mark.  Her  revery  is  broken  in  upon 
by  footsteps  of"a  big  yellow  man  with  an  enormous  moiistache," 
who  walks  with  a  cavalry  swagger. 

TIME  :     A  hot  afternoon. 

CAPTAIN    GADSBY:      Ha— hmmm  ! 
Miss  THREEGAN  (coming  back  from  England  and 
the  hills  with   reluctance}  :      Is   that  all  you  have  to 
say? 

GADSBY  :      Come   now,   dear,  be  kind   to   me.      I 


know  you  like  this  hour  to  yourself,  but  the  club's 
deserted  and  all  Simla  is  taking  its  afternoon  nap, 
and  I'm  desperately  lonely.  Dear  old  Mafflin  has 
just  gone  back  to  the  plains  and  I  miss  him  awful. 

Miss  THREEGAN  {pettishly)  :  I  half  believe  you 
care  more  for  that  Captain  Mafflin  than  you  do  for 
me,  and,  when  we're  married,  I  won't  have  it 
(tapping  her  f oat}.  I  won't  have  it,  sir. 

GADSBY  (conciliating)  :  I  say,  little  featherweight, 
you  won't  be  hard  on  Jack,  will  you?  He  saved 
my  life  at  Amdheran.  If  it  had  not  been  for  Jack, 
sweetheart,  you'd  be  engaged  to  another  man. 

Miss  THREEGAN  (indignantly)  :  Never  !  How 
dare  you  hint  at  such  a  thing  ?  We  were  always  in 
tended  for  each  other.  It  was  pre — pre 

GADSBY  :  Predestinated,  and  Jack  was  the  divine 
instrument.  So  there  ! 

Miss  THREEGAN  :  Oh,  well,  you  may  still  care 
for  Jack  a  little,  if  you'll  let  me  always  love  dear 
Emma,  and  tell  her  all  my  secrets. 

GADSBY  :  What,  that  little  Deercourt  thing  who 
used  to  make  fun  of  me  to  my  face  ?  Never,  never  ! 
She's  in  England,  isn't  she,  now  ? 

Miss  THREEGAN  :  Yes,  and  this  is  a  lovely,  long 
letter  from  her.  Do  you  know,  Pip,  I  think  she's  in 
love  with  Captain  Mafflin — just  a  little  bit  ? 

GADSBY  (with  warmth}  :  The  little  minx — hardly 
out  of  the  nursery  and  short  dresses.  Outrageous. 
Why,  Jack  is  a  man,  dear,  a  big  brave  man. 

Miss  THREEGAN  (slyly)  :  Emma  may  be  a  little 
70 


\  _ 


Miss  THKEEGAX. 


minx  and  a  nursery  child  with  an  ayah,  but  she  is  one 
year  older  than  the  young  woman  you  expect  to 
marry,  sir.  Now  what  have  you  got  to  say  for  your 
self? 

GADSBY  (cornered)  :  By  Jove,  little  one,  there's 
only  one  apology.  (Loving  interlude.*}  Now,  tell 
me  all  about  Emma's  letter — she's  a  dear  girl,  and 
Jack  must  marry  her.  {Fiercely. ,)  I'll  compel  him 
to  it. 

Miss  THREEGAN  (mollified)  :  She  writes  that  she 
is  having  a  beautiful  time  in  London  ;  and  who  do 
you  think  is  the  literary  lion  of  the  season  ? 

GADSBY  :      Couldn't  guess.      Never  read  books. 

Miss  THREEGAN  :     But  it's  an  old  friend  of  yours. 

GADSBY  :  No  friend  of  mine  ever  wrote  anything 
but  beastly,  dull  official  reports. 

Miss  THREEGAN  :  Well,  then,  stupid,  it's  Mr. 
Kipling  ! 

GADSBY  {with  astonishment}  :  What  !  Not  dear 
Ruddy,  the  boy  who  did  those  ballads  and  things  for 
the  Military  Gazette  ?  Awfully  good  fellow,  you 
know;  but  Ruddy  can't  make  literature.  Why, 
those  stories  of  his  in  the  Gazette  were  simply  photo 
graphs  of  what  we  all  see  around  us  here.  Every 
body  knows  that — true  to  life  to  the  last  button. 
That  isn't  what  they  call  literature. 

Miss  THREEGAN  (laughing  at  hini)  :  You're  a 
dear  old  goose.  You've  just  said  the  best  thing  pos 
sible  in  his  praise.  All  England  and  America  are 
talking  about  his  stories,  because  they  have  revealed 
73 


a  new  world  to  them  "  true  to  life  to  the  last  but 
ton." 

GADSBY  :  There's  Mrs.  Hauksbee  !  Let  us  call 
her  in  and  tell  her.  She  always  said  Ruddy  would 
be  a  great  man.  Wonderful  woman,  that  !  {Calling 
to  MRS.  HAUKSBEE  who  is  going  by  in  a  'Rickshaw.) 
Come  and  have  a  cup  of  tea;  we've  good  news  to 
tell  you  ! 

MRS.  HAUKSBEE  (trips  up  the  lawn  and  sits  in  a 

74 


hammock,  fanning]  :  I  wanted  to  stop,  but  I  did  not 
like  to  interrupt  a  pair  of  lovers. 

GADSBY  (with  clumsy  gallantry)  :  You're  never 
an  interruption,  Mrs.  Hauksbee.  (Miss  THREEGAN 
scowls  a  little  while  she  pours  tea.)  Did  you  know 
that  Kipling  had  taken  London  by  storm  ?  Literary 
lion  and  all  that  sort  of  thing. 

MRS.  HAUKSBEE  (who  is  never  surprised  at  any 
thing)  :  I've  been  expecting  it.  I  said  to  him  : 
"  My  dear  boy,  fill  your  pockets  with  those  stories 
of  yours  from  the  Gazette  ;  go  to  England  and  make 
a  book  out  of  them.  You'll  show  them  at  home  for 
the  first  time  what  sort  of  an  Empire  they  are  govern 
ing.  An  Englishman  likes  to  be  hit  from  the 
shoulder,  and  that  is  your  style.  You'll  hit  him." 
Rud  stroked  his  big  chin  a  moment,  rubbed  his 
glasses,  and  said  :  "I'll  try  it.  I'll  call  the  book 
'  Plain  Tales  from  the  Hills,'  and  dedicate  it  <  To  the 
Wittiest  Woman  in  India.'  "  He  always  was  a  neat 
man  at  flattery. 

Miss  THREEGAN  (with  severity}  :  I  must  say  I 
think  many  of  his  stories  in  the  Gazette  were  wicked 
— very,  very  wicked.  The  men  use  such  horrible 
language. 

MRS.  HAUKSBEE  (looking  at  GADSBY  with  a  glitter 
in  her  eyes}  :  But,  my  sweet  child,  you  must  not 
judge  all  men  by  the  beautiful  language  of  Captain 
Gadsby.  Some  of  them  do  use  horrid  words  when 
they  are  with  each  other. 

GADSBY  (whose  vocabulary  is  famous  at  the  cluft)  : 
75 


Ha — hmmm  !  Yes,  indeed,  Minnie — the  men  do 
occasionally  talk  like  that.  Ruddy  lived  with  us  and 
knew  the  slang.  (Aside.)  I'll  fine  him  a  magnum 
and  a  score  of  pegs,  when  I  catch  him  back  here,  for 
giving  the  boys  away  so  dreadfully. 

Miss  THREEGAN  (blushing  a  little)  :  But  the 
women,  Mrs.  Hauksbee  !  They  do  such  terrible 
things  in  those  stories.  Ugh.  I  don't  think  this 
world  is  very,  very  bad. 

MRS.  HAUKSBEE  (stabbing  at  GADSBY)  :  You  must 
always  believe  what  the  Captain  tells  you  about  the 
world,  when  you  are  married. 

GADSBY  (thinking  about  Mrs.  Herriott  down  at 
Naini  Tal,  and  what  she  will  say  when  he  breaks 
it  to  her  that  he  is  engaged)  :  There  are  wicked 
women  in  India,  too,  my  dear — a  good  many  of 
them.  (Humbly. ,)  But  it  mostly  isn't  their  fault ; 
it's  the  men.  We  are  often  brutes.  (Aside.)  What 
a  dashed  brute  I've  been  to  that  woman. 

MRS.  HAUKSBEE  (with  more  sincerity  than  tisital)  : 
I  think  that  Kipling  has  put  our  inmost  souls  on 
paper,  and  that  is  why  we  squirm.  I  often  told  him 
he  should  shut  his  eyes  to  what  is  unpleasant,  and  see 
more  of  the  ideal  and  beautiful.  But  he  would  glare 
at  me  through  the  upper  half  of  his  glasses,  square  his 
jaw  another  degree,  and  laugh  in  my  eyes.  By  and 
by  he  would  say,  quizzically:  "  Well,  don't  I  see 
what  is  really  and  honestly  fine  in  a  man  like  Mul- 
vaney,  or  Learoyd,  or  Gaddy  ;  or  in  a  woman  whom 
I  won't  name  in  your  presence  ;  or  in  boys  like  Lew 
76 


and  Jakin."  {Looking  at  GADSBY.)  And  I've  had 
to  acknowledge  it,  and  say  :  "  You  are  a  poet,  my 
little  man,  but  you  see  too  much."  Then  he  would 
look  far  away  to  the  snow-line  of  the  hills  and  say, 
sadly,  but  with  determination  :  "I  won't  be  driven 
by  nice  scruples  into  praising  those  things  which 
most  people  think  fine  and  virtuous  simply  because 
they  are  conventional.  I  won't,  I  won't.  Some  day 
I'll  write  a  poem  about  a  man  named  Tomlinson, 
who  could  be  admitted  neither  to  heaven  nor  hell 
when  he  died,  because  he  had  no  original  virtues  or 
no  original  vices.  He  was  simply  conventional,  and 
so  they  sent  him  back  to  London  to  be  happy." 
What  can  you  say  to  a  man  who  talks  to  you  like  that, 
Captain  Gadsby  ? 

GADSBY  (who  is  a  judge  of  meii)  :  Nothing.  By 
Jove,  I  believe  he's  got  a  hold  of  the  right  end  of 
things. 

MRS.  HAUKSBEE  (with  convictioli)  :  So  do  I. 
And  the  critics  may  call  him  bumptious,  and  gro 
tesque,  and  brutal,  and  vulgar,  and  all  the  other  ad 
jectives  which  they  use  for  what  is  simply  unconven 
tional  ;  but  I'll  always  believe  that  he  has  the  heart 
of  a  man  and  the  voice  of  a  poet.  The  world  does 
not  often  get  the  two  united  with  such  force.  Oh, 
it  is  good  to  read  what  a  strong  man  has  written. 
Writing  is  mostly  left  to  the  weak  who  like  to  talk 
about  their  own  emotions.  Kipling  looks  at  things 
like  a  man  of  action,  and  that's  the  great  thing  in 
life  or  letters. 

77 


GADSBY  :  Yes,  he  has  lived  with  us,  with  all  kinds 
of  us — and  that  is  why.  There  is  a  verse  of  his 
scrawled  in  charcoal  over  the  grill  in  the  Degchi 
Club  which  tells  it  all  : 

' '  I  have  eaten  your  bread  and  salt, 

I  have  drunk  your  water  and  wine. 
The  deaths  ye  died  I  have  watched  beside, 
And  the  lives  that  ye  led  were  mine." 

Why,  would  you  believe  it,  there  are  three  common 
soldiers  down  in  B  Company  who  would  whip  the 
regiment  if  Kipling  asked  them  to  !  (Pointing.*) 
There's  one  of  them  now,  teaching  the  colonel's  boy 
how  to  ride  a  pony.  {Calling.'*}  Mulvaney  !  Mul- 
vaney  !  Bring  the  boy  in.  The  ladies  want  to  see 
him.  (MULVANEY,  the  boy,  and  the  pony  come  up  the 
broad  roadway  to  the  veranda,  and  at  the  regulation 
distance,  salute.  The  boy  has  the 
precision  of  a  veteran.^) 

MULVANEY  :    It's  only  respict  for 
you,  Captain,  that  would  lade  me  to 
inthurrtipt  the  mornin'  drill  uv  the 
mounted  battalion. 

GADSBY  :     We  want   to  tell 
you  of  an  old  friend  of  yours — 
Mr.  Kipling.      He's  become 
/    a   great    man    at    home,    in 
England,  writing  for  them  all 
about  India. 

MULVANEY  :   God  bless  him  : 
73 


MULVANEY. 


he's  a  broth  tiv  a  man.  Many's  the  peg  he's  dhrunk 
wid  me  an'  Jock  and  Stanley.  Ses  he,  "  Mulvaney, 
soom  day  I'll  be  for  a  writin'  doon  thim  tales  thot 
ye've  been  blandanderin'  to  me  fur  years  past." 
And  faith,  if  he's  ben  doin'  that  in  London,  there's 
little  left  betune  Terence  Mulvaney  and  dis-ris-pect- 
ability  by  this  time.  Dinah  Shadd  will  mek  uv  me 
life  a  basted  purgathory  if  she  hears  ut.  {Looking at 
Miss  THREEGAN.)  Whin  ye  write  to  London,  Miss, 
wrill  ye  say  to  Mister  Kipling  that  the  ould  rig' mint 
is  dhrinkin'  health  an'  succis  to  him — three  fingers, 
standin'  up  !  (Salutes.  Then  to  boy  on  pony.') 
'Shun  !  By  foors,  right  wheel,  march  !  {Exeunt, 
singing.} 

"  And  when  the  war  began,  we  chased  the  bold  Afghan, 
An'  we  made  the  bloomin'  Ghazi  for  to  flee,  boys  O  !  " 

MRS.  HAUKSBEE  (thoughtfully)  :  It's  because  Rud 
knew  men  like  that,  and  like  you — and  all  of  us  from 
Viceroy  to  Sat's,  that  he  is  able  to  write  so  truthfully, 
so  vividly,  that  men  and  women  ten  thousand  miles 
away  feel  that  they  have  lived  here  among  us.  (Sum 
mons  her  'Rickshaw,  and  all  rise  to  walk  down  the 
lawn.} 


79 


GEORGE   MEREDITH 


'THAT  KINDLY  MAN  IN  GREY  HOMESPUN  WHO  SITS  IN  HIS  LITTLE  CHALET  ON  THE. 
HILLSIDE  YONDER,  AND  WRITES  GREAT  BOOKS." 


THE  HOUSEHOLD  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH 


NEVIL  BEAUCHAMP,    .     .    .  Commander  R.  N.  and  a  Radical. 

ADRIAN  HARLEY A  Wise  Youth  and  a  cynic. 

DIANA  WARWICK,  .     .     .     .  Of  the  Crossways,  Surrey. 

TOMREDVVORTH ,  A^English  gentleman,  engaged 

SCENE:  The  ridge  of  Box  Hill  in  Surrey,  from  which  spreads  a 
wonderful  view.  The  spires  of  Dorking  in  the  middle  distance  ; 
on  the  right  a  great  rise  of  wooded  hills,  dotted  with  country 
places,  with  a  glimpse  of  the  village  of  Guildford.  The  hills 
and  valleys  are  flooded  with  the  sunshine  of  a  perfect  June  day. 
DIANA  and  RED  WORTH  are  seated  on  a  rustic  bench  near  the 
winding  pathway  along  which  pass  and  repass  groups  on  their 
•way  to  the  summit  of  Box  Hill. 

DIANA  :     After  all  my  storms  and  shipwreck,  Tom, 
you  have  towed  the  derelict  into  this  bay  of 
green  and  peaceful  hills. 

RED  WORTH  {pointing  across  the  valley]  :  And 
there,  in  the  clump  of  trees  near  Guildford,  is  The 
Crossways — your  safe  anchorage  always. 

DIANA  :  And  I  shall  never  slip  the  anchor — never 
again  without  you  as  pilot.  The  world  is  a  great  sea, 
beautiful  and  tempestuous — and,  oh  so  cruel  to  a 
woman  alone !  (looking  in  his  eyes] .  I  am  glad  that 
you  are  so  strong  a  man,  and  that  you  love  me. 
83 


REDWORTH  :     All  the  years  that  I  have  waited  for 

you  are  a  little  day,  and  an  hour  like  this  is  a  lifetime. 

DIANA  (smiling)  :     And  this  is  my  quiet,  prosaic 

Tom,  who  never  spoke  a  word  of  love  to  me  in  all 

these  years,  but  always  fought  my  battles  ! 

REDWORTH  :  If  you  are  glad  that  I  have  been  per 
sistent  in  loving  you,  Diana,  you  must  thank  that 
kindly  man  in  grey  homespun  who  sits  in  his  little 
chalet  on  the  hillside  yonder,  and  writes  great  books. 
DIANA  :  So  it  is  Mr.  Meredith  who  has  been  mak 
ing  my  everyday  Tom  a  poet — and  not  love  at  all  ? 
We  women  always  find  that  a  man  is  the  inspiration 
of  those  best  things  which  we  flatter  ourselves  that 
we  have  inspired. 

REDWORTH  (solemnly]  :  Since  the  night  of  that  ball 
in  Dublin,  when  I  first  saw  "  the  flashing  arrows  in 
your  eyes,"  I  have  had  but  one  inspiration — the  love 
of  you.  But  one  day  when  I  was  in  despair  about 
your  loving  Dacier,  and  was  walking  gloomily  across 

the  downs  I  met  Meredith 
at  the  crossing  of  a  hedge. 
He  caught  the  trouble  in 
my  eyes,  and  we  sat  down 
on  the  top  step  of  the  stile 
to  talk  it  out.  "My 
boy,"  he  said  when  he 
had  heard  it  all,  "no 
one  can  love  as  you  love 
without  eternal  profit  to 
your  soul — whether  in  the 
84 


end  you  win  her  or  not.  It  is  the  strength  of 
Nature  in  you  creating  an  ideal  which  has  given 
and  will  always  give  a  unity  and  stability  to  your 
work.  I  never  see  a  man  successful  in  the  right  way 
(not  by  luck  or  selfishness) — a  man  who  is  doing 
strenuously  the  best  that  Nature  has  put  in  him  to  do 

that  I  do  not  begin  to  look  for  the  one  idea  which  is 

the  inspiration  of  it.  I  have  watched  your  life  and 
work  here  and  in  London  for  ten  years — your  steady, 
persistent  development — and  have  often  wondered 
what  the  main-spring  was.  Now  I  know  it  !  Go  on, 
go  on,  and  the  very  laws  of  Nature,  which  are  the 
laws  of  God,  will  fight  for  you  !  "  Then  he  strode 
across  the  downs,  his  grey  eyes  filled  with  that  soft 
light  which  Nature  gives  to  those  who  love  her. 

DIANA  (reflecting]  :  He  met  my  Tom  a  despairing 
lover  and  left  him  a  brave  man  !  Mr.  Meredith  is 
always  putting  heart  and  hope  into  thoughtful  men 
and  women  everywhere.  What  a  lovely  afternoon  his 
life  is  having — belated  fame  come  home  at  last,  the 
admiration  of  intellectual  people,  the  love  of  friends. 

RED  WORTH  {pointing  down  the  pathway)  :  There 
are  two  of  his  friends  now — as  different  as  men  can 
be  ;  both  well-born — the  one  an  enthusiast,  a  reformer, 
a  radical ;  the  other  blase  and  a  cynic.  Yet  if  you 
go  deep  enough  (as  Meredith  no  doubt  has)  you  will 
find  a  common  substratum  which  makes  them  con 
genial — the  cynic  and  the  reformer  both  love  human 
ity.  The  cynic  jeers  at  one  side  of  it — its  frailties  ; 
the  reformer  lauds  another  side  of  it — its  common 
87 


virtues.  Each  in  his  own  heart  loves  that  middle 
ground  where  frailties  and  virtues  mingle — and  that 
is  ordinary  human  nature. 

{Enter  BEAUCHAMP  and  ADRIAN.) 

BEAUCHAMP  (greeting  DIANA  and  REDWORTH)  : 
At  the  foot  of  the  hill  we  passed  Meredith  standing  by 
his  box- wood  hedge.  He  waved  a  hand  and  called 
out  to  us,  "Follow  that  path  up  the  hill  and  you'll 
find  Happiness ;  a  little  while  ago  I  saw  two  lovers 
go  by,  hand  in  hand."  (DIANA  looks  consciously  at 
REUWORTH.)  And  Adrian  jeers  back  at  him,  "  No 
happiness  ever  came  from  following  Love.  This  is 
the  hill  of  Purgatory. "  "  With  Dante's  Beatrice  at 
the  top,"  called  Meredith.  "  Rather  a  Siren  whis 
tling  from  a  rock,"  ungallantly  jibed  Adrian  ;  and  so 
we  passed  out  of  hearing  with  our  game  of"  Shuttle 
cock." 

DIANA  (to  ADRIAN)  :  Still  playing  at  cynic,  O 
Wise  Youth,  while  the  rest  of  the  world  moves  on  to 
happiness. 

ADRIAN  (to  DIANA)  :  For  you  "  the  rest  of  the 
world  "  is  simply  Redworth. 

DIANA  (bowing)  :  If  you  could  see  "  the  rest  of 
the  world  "  in  one  woman  that  I  know  you  would 
cease  being  a  cynic.  You  know  Mr.  Meredith  says 
of  you,  "  Adrian  only  sees  one  part  of  the  world,  and 
that  not  the  best  part." 

ADRIAN  :  Meredith  is  a  howling  optimist.  He 
sits  on  the  hillside  in  his  chalet  and  blows  gorgeous 


bubbles  which  mirror  this  lovely  valley  ;  and  he  calls 
them  the  world,  because  they  are  round,  and  beauti 
ful,  and  shot  with  rainbows. 

DIANA  (pointedly):  But  Adrian  is  a  jeering  pes 
simist.  He  sits  in  his  tower  at  Raynham  Abbey, 
shuts  out  all  the  light,  turns  his  eye  inward  on  the 
memories  of  his  youth,  and  says:  "This  is  the 
world.  It  is  full  of  high  hopes  which  lead  to  noth 
ing  ;  of  false  women  and  designing  men ;  of  the 
dreams  of  a  man  of  intellect  that  never  produce 
action.  All  this  is  the  world,  and  I'll  laugh  at  it." 
Oh,  Wise  Youth,  how  much  you  could  learn  from 
Meredith  ! 

BEAUCHAMP  (catching  the  last  sentence)  :  Learn 
from  Meredith  !  He  has  been  my  University.  I 
never  knew  what  it  was  to  have  any  interests  outside 
of  my  own  people  and  class  until  I  read  him  and 
talked  with  him.  Men  of  letters  are  always  praising 
his  epigrams,  his  fancy,  his  imagination.  They  miss 
his  greatness  entirely.  Meredith  is  great  because  he 
has  put  the  very  Spirit  of  Liberty  in  his  creations. 
It  is  not  Radicalism,  or  Socialism,  or  Liberalism ;  it 
is  the  attitude  of  mind  which  is  back  of  these  and  all 
other  movements  toward  a  broader  life  for  all  men. 
It  is  individualism. 

DIANA  :  His  first  rule  of  freedom  is  to  break  the 
shackles  which  other  men  have  forged  for  you. 

ADRIAN  :  And  then  he  puts  on  you  a  pair  of  his 
own  particular  kind  of  shackles  ;  I  know  the  trick  of 
the  real  philosopher.  He  prates  of  freedom — which 


means  liberty  to  make  other  people  think  as  he  him 
self  thinks.  That  is  the  basis  of  all  intellectual 
tyranny. 

BEAUCHAMP  :  Meredith  has  no  shackles.  He  says 
to  every  man  :  "  Fall  back  on  Nature  for  guidance — 
not  landscapes  and  the  mountains  which  are  the 
Wordsworthian  panacea — but  your  own  nature  in 
right  conditions." 

ADRIAN  :  To  what  awful  depths  it  leads  some 
men  ! 

BEAUCHAMP  :  Because  they  and  their  fathers  have 
been  bound  hand  and  foot  for  generations,  and  Nat 
ure  has  been  distorted.  For  all  these  there  is  but  one 
remedy — restore  the  conditions  of  Nature,  freedom 
to  work  at  what  is  congenial,  freedom  to  live  in  God's 
pure  air,  freedom  to  know  your  fellowman  on  equal 
terms  !  If  that  is  socialism,  I  am  a  socialist  and  so  is 
Meredith.  We  are  better  called  simply  humanitar 
ians. 

ADRIAN  (to  DIANA)  :  We  must  divert  Beauchamp 
or  we' 11  be  getting  a  flood  of  his  campaign  speeches 
on  us.  (To  BEAUCHAMP)  I'll  follow  you  in  your  ad 
miration  for  Meredith  on  another  tack.  His  epi 
grams  charm  me.  He  is  one  of  the  few  contempor 
ary  writers  of  fiction  who  presuppose  that  their 
readers  are  beings  of  independent  intelligence.  His 
epigrams  are  flints  which  will  only  strike  fire  against 
steel. 

DIANA  :     To  me  the  finest  thing  in  his  work  is  his 
knowledge    of  a    woman's    heart.     Other    novelists, 
90 


even  great  ones,  have  made  their  women  either  deli 
cate  creatures  of  sentiment,  or  woolly-minded  men  in 
petticoats.  It  has  been  beyond  them  to  picture  sen 
timent  and  strength  united  in  a  charming  woman. 
But  Mr.  Meredith  has  raised  the  standard  of  woman 
hood  in  fiction  by  women  like  Rosamund,  Lucy, 
Rhoda  Fleming,  Vittoria,  Jenny  Denham,  and  my 
dearest  Emmy. 

ADRIAN  :  Wise  Meredith  !  He  flatters  your  sex 
and  you  love  him,  and  read  his  books. 

REDWORTH  (quietly)  :  You  have  all  had  your  say 
about  him,  and  have  missed  his  best  achievement. 
Every  one  of  his  books  teaches  that  the  true  social 
unit  is  not  a  strong  man  alone,  or  an  acute  woman 
alone — but  a  man  and  a  woman  who  love  each  other 
with  all  their  hearts.  That  is  Nature's  greatest  les 
son.  And  all  the  barriers  which  caste,  or  prejudice, 
or  creed  place  between  loving  hearts  are  the  foes  of 
progress.  Break  them  down,  Beauchamp ;  break 
them  down,  Adrian!  It  isn't  optimism,  or  pessim 
ism,  or  individualism  that  rules  the  world.  It  is 
Love  ! 

ADRIAN  (bowing  to  DIANA  and  REDWORTH)  :  I 
salute  the  Social  Unit,  and  continue  my  way  alone 
up  the  mountain  of  Purgatory.  (Starts  up  the  path 
way.) 

BEAUCHAMP  :  And  I  follow  and  hope  to  find 
Beatrice  at  the  summit.  (Exit.) 

DIANA  (calling  after)  :      Her  name  is  Jenny  Den- 
ham,  and  I  hope  you'll  find  her. 
91 


REDWORTH  :  Come,  dear,  the  shadow  of  the 
mountain  has  fallen  on  The  Crossways,  and  we  have 
along  walk  across  the  valley  before  sunset. 

(They  go  down  the  Ridge  of  Box  Hill.) 


92 


COME,  DEAK,  THE  SHADOW  OF  THE  MOUNTAIN  HAS  FALLEN  ON 
THE  CROSSWAYS." 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON 


1  NOT  TRULY   ONE,  BUT  TRULY  TWO." 


THE   HOUSEHOLD  OF 
ROBERT    LOUIS    STEVENSON 


ALAN  BRECK,   ......  A  Highland  Jacobite  of  1750. 

DAVID  BALFOUR,  ...  A  Young  Lowland  Scot. 

DR.  JEKYLL  .......  A  Philanthropist. 

MR.  'HYDE  ........  A  Villain. 

PRINCE  OTTO  ......  >  Idealists,     and    late    rulers  of 

PRINCESS  SERAPHINA,      .     .  )      Griinewald. 

KING  TEMBINOKA,  ....  Of  Apemama,  South  Sea  Islands. 

SCENE  I.  —  A  moonlight  night  on  Castle  Hill,  Edinburgh.  ALAN 
and  DAVID  are  sitting  on  the  wall  of  the  turret  which  half  en 
closes  the  great  cannon,  Mons  Meg.  Below  them  lies  the  city  ; 
in  the  distance  the  Firth  of  Forth,  and  on  the  horizon  the  coast 
of  Fife. 


RLAN  BRECK:      Do  ye  ken,  David,   that  we're 
bogles  brought  back   to    Auld  Reekie  by  that 
scribbling  warlock,  Rab  Stevenson  ? 

DAVID  BALFOUR  :  Ay.  He's  a  braw  hand  at  clish- 
maclaver.  I  dinna  ken  why  lads  and  lasses  gang 
aboot  reedin'  the  lees  he's  writ  aboot  me  and  ye, 
Alan  Breck.  Ye'  re  no  sic  a  grand  maun  to  be  re 
membered  a  hundred  years  syne. 

ALAN    (with   mock   indignation)  :    Man,    I    whiles 
wonder  at  ye  !     That  was  a  grand  tale  he  wrote  about 
the  fechtin  in  the  roundhouse.     Waur  I  no  a  bonny 
97 


fighter,  my  lad  ?  An'  it's  a  gude  thing  to  have  it 
writ  in  a  book  and  read  by  Highlanders  the  noo.  It 
taks  a  maun  to  fecht  like  that  ! 

DAVID  (j'cbukingly)  :  Ye' re  aye  vain  of  your 
prowess,  Alan.  Ye  waur  a  maun  the  days  lang  syne, 
but  noo  ye're  a  puir  wraith  that  the  sun  will  drive  ben. 

ALAN  :  But  Rab  Stevenson  has  gie  us  life  for 
anither  hundred  years.  And  Scots  aye  talk  aboot  us 
when  they  sit  by  the  ingle-neuk  with  his  bukes  i' 
their  loofs. 

DAVID  :  I'm  no  sayin'  he  canna  write  aboot 
fechtin,  and  murder,  and  piratical  men,  and  a'  sic 
wardly  things  that  the  Deil  inspires.  But  he's  no 
releegious,  Alan  ;  he  hae's  nae  respect  for  the  Auld 
Kirk  ;  and,  therefore,  he  hae's  nae  richt  to  be  called 
a  leetary  maun. 

ALAN  :  Hoot  lad  !  Ye  mak  me  dour  wi'  your 
fashin'.  There's  Rabbie  Burns  who  writ  verses 
against  the  Auld  Kirk,  and  did'na  we  meet  him 
the  ither  nicht  a  crackin'  jokes  amang  the  ghaists, 
wi'  Sir  Walter,  and  Allan  Ramsay,  and  Dr.  John 
Brown  —  ay,  and  his  own  ne'er-do-weel,  Tarn 
o'Shanter,  amang  them  all?  It's  no  the  auld  Kirk, 
God  bless  it  alway,  but  the  heart  i'  a  maun  that 
maks  him  gude.  And  Rab  Stevenson's  heart's  i'  the 
richt  spot. 

DAVID  (with  his  usual  caution^  :  Well,  I'm  dout- 
sum.  There's  no  enoo'  o'  the  Catechism  i'  his  tales 
to  mak'  them  leetary.  John  Knox  wouldna  approve 
of  them. 


ALAN  (ivit/i  indignation^  \  Ye've  been  a  ghaist 
for  a  hundred  years,  livin'  abune  the  clouds,  and  ye 
canna  see  that  the  Gude  Sheperd  does' na  wait  for 
John  Knox  to  speak  before  he  lets  a  Scotsman  into, 
the  leetary  fold  ! 

fog  rises  from  the  Firth  of  Forth,  and  sweeps 
up  the  Castle  Hill.  The  sun  creeps  over  Ar 
thur 's  Seat,  and  as  its  first  ray  touches  the  Castle 
wall,  ALAN  and  DAVID  vanish  in  the  mist.) 


SCENE  II.  —  The  laboratory  of  DR.  JEKYLL  in  his  old  London 
house.  The  walls  from  floor  to  ceiling-  are  lined  with  shelves 
filled  with  bottles  of  chemicals.  A  table  between  two  windows 
is  covered  with  retorts,  test  tubes,  etc.  A  Buns  en  burner  is 
throwing  a  jet  of  pale  blue  flame  on  a  retort  filled  with  a  bub 
bling  liquid,  in  which  the  globules  rise  and  fall,  flashing  like 
many-colored  eyes.  A  fire  is  on  the  hearth,  and  before  it  stand 
DR.  JEKYLL  and  MR.  HYDE  in  earnest  conversation. 


KYLL  : 

£- ~^HIS  writer  Stevenson,  whose  book  I 
hold  in  my  hands,  reported  me  eight  years 
ago  as  saying,  "  Man  is  not  truly  one,  but 
truly  two.  I  say  two,  because  the  state  of 
my  own  knowledge  does  not  pass  beyond 
that  point.  Others  will  follow,  others  will 
outstrip  me  on  the  same  lines ;  and  I  hazard 
the  guess  that  man  will  be  ultimately  known 
for  a  mere  polity  of  multifarious,  incongru 
ous,  and  independent  denizens."  When 
this  was  published  it  was  greeted  with  rapt- 
99 


lire  as  the   ingenious  invention 
of  a  clever  romancer  —  a  fable 
to  teach  a  moral  truth, 
already    the   guess 
which   I    simply 
hazarded  has  been 
scientifically 
demonstrated    by 
the    hypnotic    in 
vestigations  of 
Charcot,    Janet, 
Binet,  and  the  rest. 
We  now  know  that 
by  hypnotism  a  sin 
gle  individual   may 
be  divided  into  three 
personalities,  of  widely  dif- 
x-st       ferent  and  often  antagonistic  traits.     Of 
course  no  one  remembers  now  that  Stevenson,  the  ro 
mancer,  was  the  first  to  give  this  truth  to  the  world. 

MR.  HYDE  :  You  may  remember  that  a  good 
many  hundred  years  before  Stevenson  or  Charcot, 
there  was  recorded  the  case  of  a  man  out  of  whom 
there  were  cast  seven  devils. 

JEKYLL  {with  severity*}  :  We  are  now  talking 
scientifically.  Of  course,  in  literature  there  have  been 
hints  of  a  dual  nature  in  man — from  Adam  to  Faust. 
But  I  do  believe  that  in  all  his  studies  of  character 
Stevenson  has  been  more  subtile  than  most  modern 
writers,  because  he  has  grasped  this  idea  of  the  coin- 


more 


plexity  of  our  motives  and  actions.  He  never  draws 
a  chalk  line  between  good  and  bad,  but  shades  the 
one  into  the  other  so  gradually  that  you  are  in  doubt 
of  the  relative  quality  of  an  action. 

HYDE  (with  a  satirical  smile)  :  As  a  man  wholly 
wicked  I  approve  of  that.  Nothing  will  so  rapidly 
lead  men  my  way  as  these  vague  distinctions. 

JEKYLL  {protesting)  :  But  I  am  not  putting  Ste 
venson  forward  solely  as  a  moralist !  He  is  a  literary 
artist  who  has  had  the  good  fortune  to  grasp  a  great 
psychological  truth  which  helps  to  put  his  art  in  line 
with  modern  thought. 

HYDE  (impatiently]  :  Bother  modern  thought ! 
Stevenson  does  not  care  a  rush  for  it — he  is  a  writer 
of  stories  for  the  sake  of  the  story.  Don't  load  him 
down  with  subtilties  which  never  entered  his  head. 

JEKYLL  :  There  was  something  more  than  the 
story  in  "Prince  Otto,"  "Will  o'  the  Mill," 
"Olalla,"  and  "The  Master  of  Ballantrae."  I'll 
grant  that  he  would  like  to  be  only  a  teller  of  en 
trancing  tales,  but  the  blood  of  the  preaching  Bal- 
fours  is  too  much  for  him,  and  he  moralizes  in  spite 
of  himself. 

HYDE  (laughing)  :  It's  pretty  bad  morality  often, 
I'm  glad  to  say.  He  has  a  way  of  making  his  wicked 
men  far  more  attractive  than  his  good  ones — which 
is  the  way  of  the  world,  isn't  it,  my  learned  Doc 
tor? 

DR.  JEKYLL  (with  righteous  indignation}  :  No, 
sir  !  No  !  The  motives  of  our  best  actions  are,  I 
101 


will  admit,  always  slight 
ly  mixed  with  something 
base.  But  in  the  long 
run  a  good  action  has 
good  motives,  and  a  bad 
action  has  bad  motives. 
The  world  knows  that  as 
well  as  you  do,  and  is 
attracted  or  repelled  by 
a  man  accordingly.  If 
I  may  be  personal,  you 
need  only  think  of  the 
esteem  in  which  I  am 
held  in  London,  and  the 
detestation  which  follows 
your  every  footstep.  (Walks  to  the  table  and  pours 
some  of  the  fiery  liquid  into  a  glass,  which  he  hands 
to  HYDE  to  drink. .) 

HYDE  {jeering  as  he  drinks  if)  :  And  yet  /  am  a 
part  of  the  motive  in  every  philanthropic  act  of 
yours  ;  /  stand  behind  your  good  deeds  and  say : 
"  You  will  lose  social  and  scientific  caste  if  you  are 
not  respectable."  Therefore  you  are  ^^ 

respectable  !     A  fine  unmixed  motive 
that  i s  !    (HYDE  springs  #  /  J  E KYLL ' s 
throat.      There  is  a  sharp  explo 
sion,  and  a  green  light  fills  the 
room.      When  it  fades  out  into 
white,     DR.    JEKYLL    is    seen      { 
alone,  sitting  in  his  arm-chair, 
102 


with  an  expression  of  horror  on  his  face,  as  though  he 
had  just  seen  and  dreaded  the  return  of  an  awful 
vision, ) 


SCENE  III.  —  The  heart  of  the  forest  of  Griincwald.  PRINCE 
OTTO  and  PRINCESS  SERAPHINA  seated  on  a  fallen  tree  by 
the  edge  of  a  pool  into  which  a  white  cascade  is  plunging. 

PRINCESS  SERAPHINA  :  In  this  forest  we  awoke 
from  our  dream  of  Power,  and  found  love ;  we  lost  a 
principality  and  found  each  other. 

PRINCE  OTTO  :  We  fled  from  ambition  and  dis 
covered  happiness. 

SERAPHINA  :  And  now  to  the  world  we  appear  to 
be  only  poor  refugees — you  a  hunter  and  I  a  house 
wife — all  our  glory  gone,  and  nothing  to  live  for  ! 

OTTO:  But  like  Stevenson's  "Lantern-Bearers," 
we  carry  out  of  sight,  near  our  hearts,  the  hidden  light 
which  glorifies  it  all. 

SERAPHINA  :  What  an  illuminating  fable  of  his 
that  is  !  The  "mound  of  mud  "  in  which  ordinary 
people  seem  to  dwell  is  nothing  to  him  ;  he  is  inter 
ested  only  in  the  golden  chamber  at  the  heart  of 
which  each  dwells  delighted. 

OTTO  :  Yes,  that  is  why  we  always  read  him  with 
such  joy.  We  know  that  he  will  take  us  on  a  chase 
after  the  "  incommunicable  delight  of  life." 

SERAPHINA  :  It  is  what  Henry  James  calls  the  per 
petual  boy  in  him — the  glorious  zest  of  living. 

OTTO  :  The  song  of  the  nightingale  which  lured 
103 


the  monk  into  the  woods,  and  when 
he  returned  he  found  that  half  a  cen 
tury  had  passed  as  a  day  ! 

SERAPHINA  :     I  fear  Stevenson  does 
not  always  take  us  after  the  nightin 
gale's  song.     There  is  a  hint  of  fol 
lowing  a  bird  of  prey  now  and  then 
.-     — a  suggestion  of  carrion  which  I 
;  -    don't  quite  like. 

OTTO  :     Oh,  but  remember  that 
with  him  it's  always  on  the  way  to 
the  nightingale's  song.     If  you  fol 
low  him  long  enough  the  path  ends  in 
beauty. 

SERAPHINA  :  But  he  ought  to  make  a 
detour  'round  the  carcasses.  I  should  not  mind  a  few 
briars  by  the  way,  but  nothing  disagreeable.  Oh, 
the  awful  gore  of  chapters  in  ' '  The  Wrecker. ' ' 

OTTO  :  That  is  spoken  like  a  woman — it  is  the 
physical  image  of  it  which  repels  you.  You  lose 
sight  of  the  great  passions  portrayed  in  such  chapters. 
SERAPHINA  :  He  is  an  avowed  disciple  of  ideal 
ism,  of  romance — a  votary  of  beauty — and  he  should 
not  spoil  his  pages,  dedicated  to  beauty,  with  repel 
lent  images.  The  real  joy  of  life  does  not  lie  in  that 
direction.  I  don't  want  the  smoke  and  smell  of  the 
lantern  (to  use  his  own  image).  I  only  want  to  feel 
its  warmth  near  my  heart,  and  to  flash  its  ray  of  light 
into  the  darkness,  now  and  then. 

OTTO  :     That  is  always  the  woman's  point  of  view. 
104 


But  for  the  boys  on  the  links  (and  the  men  they  pre 
figure),  the  pungent  odor  of  the  blistering  tin  of  the 
lantern  under  their  coats  is  an  essential  part  of  that 
series  of  sensations  which  send  their  imagination 
soaring  away  to  the  Elysian  Fields.  A  man  often 
must  build  his  castle  in  Spain  on  piles  that  are  driven 
into  the  mud. 

SERAPHINA  :  For  me  the  real  Stevenson  is  the 
author  of  your  story,  "Prince  Otto,"  of  "  Under 
woods,"  "A  Child's  Garden  of  Verses,"  "  Virgin! - 
bus,"  "Will  o'  the  Mill,"  and  "An  Inland  Voy 
age."  They  are  builded  so  far  above  the  mire. 

OTTO  :  And  for  me  he  is  the  author  of  ' '  Treasure 
Island,"  "Kidnapped,"  "The  Master,"  "The 
Wrecker,"  and  "  David  Balfour. "  Between  the  two 
groups  is  almost  the  whole  range  of  the  imagination 
— from  the  purely  idyllic 

to  the  most  complex  pas-  ,.  ..^ S***- 

sions.      He    plays    upon  '-'^- 

this    wonderful    organ, 
with   words    for   notes — 
and,   oh,  the  music  of 
them  ! 

SERAPHINA  :     You 
get   very  near   the  se-     >.. 
cret  of  his  skill   as    a 
writer    when    you    say 
that.     It  is  "  the  love 
of  lovely  words"  which 
leads    him    on    and    on, 


•**^-=5V;, 

n  ->s 


through  "  wet  woods  and  miry  lane,"  till  at  last  you 
can  almost  hear  his  song  in  the  water-fall  yonder  : 

"  Where  hath  fleeting  Beauty  led  ? 
To  the  doorway  of  the  dead. 
Life  is  over,  life  was  gay  ; 
We  have  come  the  primrose  way." 


EPILOGUE. 


THE  SONG  OF  TEMBINOKA,  KING  OF  APEMAMA. 

Sing,  my  warriors,  sing  !  men  of  the  sharklike  race  ! 
Sing  of  the  poet  who  came  and  greeted  us  face  to  face. 
He  from  the  cold,  gray  North,  I,  in  these  tropic  isles, 
Meet  as  brothers  and  bards,  with  eloquent  songs  and  smiles — 

Meet  as  brothers,  though   sing 
ing   words    that  are  strange 
and  proud — 
Pale  and  wan  in  his  face,  while 

mine  is  a  thunder-cloud. 
But  the  heart  of  a  man  is  hidden 
by     neither     language     nor 
skin — 

To  love  as  a  man  and  a  brother 
maketh  the  whole  world  kin. 
The  tales  that  he  tells  are  of  he 
roes  who  fought  like  braves 
to  the  death — 

Bone  of  our  bone  are  these  he 
roes,  the  very  breath  of  our 
breath  ! 
Then  sing,    my  warriors,    sing  ! 

Men  of  the  sharklike  race, 
Sing  of  the  poet  who  came  and 
greeted  us  face  to  face  ! 


106 


J.  M.  BARRIE 


WATTY  SCOTT  OR  JAMIE  BARRIE.' 


THE   HOUSEHOLD  OF  J.  M.  BARRIE 


GAVIN  DISHART,    .     . 

BABBIE, 

TAMMAS  HAGGART,    . 


j  The  little  Minister  of  the  Auld 
1      Licht  Kirk  in  Thrums. 
j  Known     as    "  The    Egyptian," 
(      married  to  Gavin. 
The  Humorist  of  Thrums. 


SCENE  :  The  summer  seat  in  the  garden  of  the  Auld  Licht  Manse 
in  Thrums.  Babbie  is  seated  in  the  sun  of  a  warmish  June  day , 
knitting  blue  yarn  stockings.  Enter  GAVIN  from  the  door  of 
his  study,  carrying  a  new  book  in  his  hand. 


GAVIN  (sitting  near  BABBIE)  : 
_xX"  e's  been  at  his  tricks  again. 


BABBIE  :     Who  ? 

GAVIN  :  Jamie  Barrie.  Here's  more 
writin'  about  us  he's  been  putting  in  a 
book. 

BABBIE  (looking  at  him  slyly)  :  Does  he 
tell  any  more  tales  about  a  Little  Minister 
who  was  fooled  by  an  Egyptian  ? 

GAVIN  (dropping  into  Scotch,  affectionate 
ly^  :  Ah,  my  lassie,  but  Jamie  did  mak 
you  braw  and  bonnie  in  the  buke  !  I  am 
109 


no  sayin'  that  you're  not  a  cantie 
bit  stocky  wi  the  licht  o'  heaven 
i'  your  een,  but  Jamie  shudna  hae 
flattered  you  so  to  your  face.  It's 
wicked  and  warldly  ! 

BABBIE  (with  a  mocking  sigh]  : 
We  all  have  our  trials  to  bear,  and 
it's    yours    to    have    a   worldly 

minded  woman  for  a  wife. 
^V      GAVIN  (indignantly)  :   I  did 
/'     not  say  that,  my  lass.      I  said 
Jamie   Barrie  was  worldly  to 

put  your  capers  with  the  soldiers  in  a  book,  and  to 
tell  everybody  that  you  had  a  bonnie  face. 
BABBIE  (roguishly)  :     Well,  haven't  I  ? 
GAVIN  (cannily)  :     Some  might  think  so.     I  have 
no  definite  opinion. 

BABBIE  (with  flashing  eyes)  :  You  haven't,  my 
little  minister  ?  Then  what  did  you  mean  by  your 
compliments  that  evening  when  you  came  to  meet  me 
at  Nanny  Webster's  well  ?  I'll  have  you  up  before 
Tammas  Whamond  and  the  session  of  the  kirk  for 
deceit  and  false  speaking. 

GAVIN  (laughing)  :  Oh,  but  I  love  to  rouse  the 
Egyptian  in  your  flashing  black  eyes  !  They  glow 
with  fire  like  Loch  Lomond  at  sunset. 

BABBIE    (demurely)  :     And    you,    an    Auld    Licht 
minister,  blethering  like  that   to  a  woman  who  has 
been  your  wife   for  a   year  !     You're  what   Tammas 
Haggart  calls  a  "  blaw-i'-my-lug. " 
no 


GAVIN  {who  has  /earned  her  ways]  :  A  man,  even 
a  minister,  soon  learns  to  manage  his  wife  by  telling 
her  what  she  likes  to  hear.  Tammas  gave  me  that 
advice  soon  after  I  married  you,  and  he  is  a  wise  man. 

BABBIE  :  Tammas  has  been  spoiled  because  Jamie 
Barrie  put  him  in  his  book.  The  other  day  he 
spoke  to  me  about  "  me  and  Rab  Burns  and  other 
leetary  men."  He  was  finding  fault  with  your  ser 
mon  at  the  time  as  hardly  up  to  his  standard. 

GAVIN  :  Barrie  may  have  spoiled  Tammas  a  lit 
tle,  but  Thrums,  as  a  whole,  is  proud  of  his  books. 
I  think  I  understand  my  people  better  by  reason  of 
them. 

BABBIE  (seriously)  :  Yes,  he  has  put  in  his  books 
the  heroism  of  poverty.  It  is  so  easy  to  put  a  rich 
and  titled  hero  in  a  book,  but  to  show  heroism  in 
narrow  and  forbidding  circumstances,  like  Jess  and 
Hendry's,  in  "A  Window  in  Thrums,"  is  a  very 
difficult  thing. 

GAVIN  :      He  does  more  than  that.      He  shows  you 
the  compensations  of  poverty.     All  the  books  I  used 
to  study  at  the  University  made  pov 
erty  a  hateful  thing — a  blot  on  the  ;f/:   ,\ 
fair    earth.       But    Barrie's    Thrums' 
weavers  teach  a  different  lesson. 

BABBIE  :     And  we  who  live  among     •'  t~<  y7  ,-,    ''  ^f 
them  know  how  much  better  off  they         \^VX 
are  than  many  of  the  rich.      I  know  I 
should  be  happier  in  Jess's    cottage 
than  I  was  in  Lord  Rintoul's  castle.         IN  A  BOOK. 
in 


GAVIN  {putting  on  his  severe preach 
er 's   manner)  :      It's  the  fear  of 
the  Lord  that  glorifies  the  life 
of  rich  and  poor  alike. 
BABBIE   (mischievously)  :     I 
am    not    so   sure    of  that.     It's 
only  the  poor   who  fear  the  Lord  ; 
the  rich  patronize  Him.     I    know, 
'""'xV  for  I've  lived  with  both  kinds. 

'THE    RICH   PATRONIZE  HlM." 

GAVIN    (a    little    shocked)  :      \\e 
must  not  jest  with  serious  things. 

BABBIE  (confidently)  :  There  is  nothing  wrong  in 
telling  the  truth.  Barrie  sees  it  clearer  than  we  do 
here.  It  is  absolute  fidelity  to  their  affections  that 
makes  people  worth  anything,  whether  they  be  rich 
or  poor.  That  is  why  the  great  world  has  laughed 
and  cried  over  the  "Window  in  Thrums."  They 
looked  right  into  the  heart  of  that  little  family  and 
found  everything  clean,  and 
genuine,  and  honest.  \~^  /T,  v  y.\ 

GAVIN  (admiringly)  :     WThat      J^  "-^— .^     ~r^l~~~       ^ 
a  little  philosopher  I  have  mar-       ^LjiiSw 
ried  !     And   I   thought  -0;;^    :      .  ;  ~/J . 

she  was  only  a  half- wild  /~**4'  '••  '•     '  ^    J     "••^fi      • 

Egyptian!  ,_  ^    "''\-,   ,/..^:"^v 

BABBIE  :      Oh,  I'll  be  ^!^;  H  ;,.i  ,  J&i$Q>^> 

writing    your     sermons      t^^^^<r^"  vlJt^ 

yet,  and  the  session  will  -.J*.> 

wake  up  to  listen. 

"THE    GREAT    WORLD     HAS    LAUGHED    AND    CRIED 

GAVIN:      You    can  OVER 'THE  WINDOW  IN  THRUMS.'" 

IT2 


HE     CAME     INTO     MY    STUDY    WITH     UNUSUAL 
SOLEMNITY." 


begin  by  telling  me  what  to  say  at  the  Literary  Club 
which  meets  to-night  at  the  Town  House.  Haggart 
asked  me  yesterday  to  take  part  in  the  discussion. 
He  came  into  my  study  with  unusual  solemnity,  and 
said  that  after  prayerful  consid 
eration  the  Club  had  decided 
that  the  time  had  arrived  to 
discuss  the  question  whether 
Watty  Scott  or  Jamie  Barrie 
was  the  greatest  Scottish  nov 
elist.  Dite  Walls  is  to  read  a 
poem  on  the  subject,  and  Mr. 
Dickie  is  to  compare  Scott  and 
Homer. 

BABBIE:      Evidently   Mr. 
Dickie  does  not  put  Barrie  in  the  same  class  with 
Scott  and  Homer  ? 

GAVIN  :  Oh,  no.  You  know  he  is  the  free-think 
ing  schoolmaster  from  Tilliedrum,  and  is  a  little  jeal 
ous  of  the  recent  literary  eminence  of  Thrums.  The 
other  day  he  said  to  me,  contemptuously:  ''Jamie 
Barrie  is  nought  but  a  U.  P.  minister  turned  to 
writin'  tales,  and  ower  poor  tales  at  that.  Watty 
Scott  wudna  ever  hae  thocht  that  Tammas  Haggart 
was  sarceestic." 

BABBIE  (smiling) :  What  does  Tammas  himself 
think  of  Barrie? 

GAVIN  :  Here  he  is,  coming  for  my  answer  about 
attending  the  Club.  Let  us  ask  him. 


(Enter  TAMMAS  HAGGART.) 

HAGGART  (bowing)  :  Hoo's  a'  wi  ye?  And  are 
ye  coomin'  the  nicht  to  the  Leetary  Club  ? 

GAVIN  :  Ay,  and  I  am  hoping  to  hear  your  views 
about  Jamie. 

BABBIE  :  As  I  can't  be  there  to  hear,  won't  you 
tell  me  what  you're  going  to  say,  Tammas? 

HAGGART  (in  deep  thought)  :  I  dinna  ken  yet. 
As  I  hae  often  said  to  Jamie  Barrie,  "  Humour  spouts 
oot  by  itsel."  It  will  be  humourous,  nae  doot,  and 
Davit  Lunan  winna  be  able  to  see  the  place  to  lauch. 
Davit  is  daft. 

BABBIE  :  But  you'll  praise  Jamie's  books,  won't 
you  ?  We  can't  let  Mr.  Dickie  go  back  to  Tillie- 
drum  and  say  we're  ashamed  of  our  ain  bairn. 

HAGGART  :  He'll  no  do  that.  I  mean  to  be  sae 
sarceestic  to  Mr.  Dickie,  that  he'll  go  ben  to  Tillie- 
drum  wi'  respect  for  all  of  us. 

BABBIE  (impatiently  :  But  what  do  you  think  of 
Mr.  Barrie  ? 

HAGGART  (meditatively)  :  Jamie  is  no  a  humourist 
like  mysel.  Jamie  is  what,  i'  the  minister's  presence, 
I  may  call  a  Romanticalicist,  and  when  I  say  that,  I 
ken  that  Waster  Lunny  will  think  he  knows  what  I  am 
haverin'  aboot.  But  naebody,  even  the  minister,  kens 
what  I  mean  by  a  Romanticalicist.  (Laughing  to  him 
self.'}  Ay,  maun,  but  that's  a  fine  bit  o'  sarcasm. 
(Rubbing  his  chin.}  What  I  mean  by  it  is  that  Jamie 
Barrie  sees  the  outside  of  hoo  we  all  live  in'Thrums, 
114 


but  he  doesna  grasp  the  real  inards  of  it.  So  he 
maks  up  the  inards  oot  of  his  ain  head  and  writes  it 
on  paper,  and  calls  it  a  true  tale.  We  are  no  sae 
glaikit  as  he  maks  us.  We  were  no  born  on  the 
Sawbath. 

GAVIN  :      But  he  does  not  say  we  are  glaikit  (silly). 

HAGGART  (irritated)  :  He  put  it  doon  in  writin' 
that  Tammas  Haggart  said,  "  A  body  canna  be  ex- 
peckit  baith  to  mak  the  joke  an  to  see't  ;  that  would 
be  doin'  twa  fowk's  wark."  I  ken  better  than  that. 
I've  made  a  joke  and  seen't  mysel  at  the  same  time — 
but  no  vera  often.  I  always  see  the  joke  within  a 
week  o'  makin'  it. 

BABBIE  :      I  know  you   do,  and  I'll  tell  Jamie  so 
the  next  time  he  comes  to  Thrums. 
(MARGARET  calls  from  the  door  that  Wearywarld  has 
come  to  see  the  minister.      All  exeunt.) 


' 


I    •  i  ;iv 

^  ->j>4         • 

<^s 


"IVE    MADE    A   JOKE    AND    SEEN    IT    MYSEL    AT   THE    SAME    TIME.' 


THE  HOME  OF  ROMANCE 


THE  HOME  OF  ROMANCE 


THE  WISE  ADRIAN )   of    New  York,    and  recently 

THE  GENTLE  DIANA,      .     .    .  )      wedded. 


SCENE  :    The  deck  of  a  steamer  on  the  Caledonian   Canal,  between 
Banavie  and  Inverness,  in  the  Highlands  of  Scotland. 


TIME  :    The  Present — midsummer. 

RDRIAN  :  They  like  to  call  this  the  "  Home  of 
Romance,"  as  though  the  Scottish  landscape  were 
responsible  for  it  all.  The  true  home  of  romance  is 
the  warm  heart  of  a  man  or  woman — and  you  can 
easily  find  that  in  other  lands  than  the  Highlands. 

DIANA  :      Even  in  New  York  ?      . 

ADRIAN  :  I  found  it  there — but  what  a  search  I 
made  for  it  !  I  began  to  think  that  it  was  as  elu 
sive  as  the  Philosopher's  stone.  One  day,  when  I 
was  despairing,  I  met  you. 

DIANA  :     But  I  don't  turn  what  I  touch  into  gold. 

ADRIAN  :  Oh,  no.  I've  already  found  out  that 
you  reverse  the  process.  You  turn  gold  into  any 
thing  that  takes  your  fancy.  We  have  ten  trunks 
119 


filled  with  the  results  of  your  necromancy.      Think  of 
the  duty  on  them  ! 

DIANA  :  Yes — a  real  home  of  romance  comes 
high.  But  you  should  be  thankful  that  I  am  a  simple 
villa,  and  not  a  great  castle  with  scores  of  retainers. 
They  are  expensive. 

ADRIAN:  You  shall  always  be  "just  as  high  as 
my  heart." 

DIANA:  I'll  remind  you  of  that  some  day.  It 
isn't  safe  to  make  pretty  speeches  to  a  tyrannical 
wife. 

ADRIAN  :  Very  well — we'  11  have  lots  of  old  scores 
to  settle  up  "  some  day."  I'm  making  note  of  them, 
because  you  know  we  can' t  disagree  on  our  wedding 
journey. 

DIANA  :  I  can.  For  instance,  I  think  you  are  all 
wrong  in  poking  fun  at  the  Scotch  for  calling  this  the 
"  home  of  romance."  Think  of  the  romantic  places 
we  have  seen  in  the  past  three  days.  (Rapidly  turns 
the  leaves  of  a  guide-book.)  There  was  the  place 
where  Roderick  Dhu  and  Fitz- James  fought  in  the 
Trossachs. 

ADRIAN  :  A  quiet  little  bit  of  forest,  that  no  one 
would  look  at  if  Sir  Walter  had  not  written  a  poem. 

DIANA  :     And  there  was  Ellen' s  Isle. 

ADRIAN  :  Sir  Walter  again — you  would  never 
have  mentioned  it  if  he  had  not. 

DIANA  (impatiently} :  But  think  of  Oban,  and 
Dunstaffnage  Castle,  and  the  Cataract  of  Connel — 
all  in  an  hour. 

120 


ADRIAN  :  Yes  ;  William  Black,  Professor  Blackie, 
and  Ossian  are  responsible  for  your  interest  in  them. 
I  also  have  read  the  guide-book. 

DIANA  :  Ugh  !  You  are  a  horrid,  horrid — what 
you  call  it — iconoclast.  But  you  can't  say  anything 
mean  about  Ben  Nevis.  Think  what  a  view  we  had 
of  him  this  morning.  Did  you  ever  see  a  finer  min 
gling  of  grays  and  greens  and  browns,  with  patches  of 
purple,  when  the  sun  came  out  ?  And  over  it  all  the 
blue-white  mist  crowning  his  stately  head. 

ADRIAN  :  Yes,  all  that,  and  noted  besides  for 
(quoting)  "  the  distillery  from  which  comes  the  cele 
brated  whiskey  called  '  Long  John  '  or  '  Dew  of  Ben 
Nevis  '  That  is  what  makes  it  dear  to  the  heart  of 
the  Scot. 

DIANA  (desperately}  :  But  wasn't  "The  Well  of 
Heads"  awe-inspiring — terrible? 

ADRIAN  :  A  nice  old  rock  with  seven  heads  very 
badly  carved  on  it,  and  an  inscription  commemorat 
ing  a  very  bloody  ending  to  an  old  feud,  which 
simply  isn't  in  for  gore  with  the  McCoy-Hatfield 
feud  in  our  own  country.  You  would  not  travel  very 
far  at  home  to  see  the  tomb  of  all  the  McCoys,  would 
you? 

DIANA  :  But  I  would  to  see  such  a  sight  as  the 
"Falls  of  Foyers"  where  we  climbed  at  the  last 
landing. 

ADRIAN  :      Simply  because  Burns  wrote 

"  Among  the  heathy  hills  and  ragged  woods 
The  roaring  Foyers  pours  his  mossy  floods." 
121 


Now  Bryant  wrote  better  poetry  than  that  about  the 
Kaaterskill  Falls  at  home,  and  yet  you  made  fun  of 
them  last  summer  *  *  because  they  turn  them  on  for  a 
quarter  apiece." 

DIANA  (laughing):  It  was  funny,  wasn't  it? — 
and  the  excuse  is  that  the  money  goes  to  the  Metho 
dists.  It  ought  to  be  Baptist  money. 

ADRIAN  :  But  honestly,  Diana,  Scotland  is  the 
home  of  romance  because  it  is  the  home  of  Scott, 
Burns,  Black,  Macdonald,  Stevenson,  and  Barrie — 
and  of  thousands  of  men,  like  that  old  Highlander 
in  kilts  on  the  tow-path,  who  loves  what  they  have 
written.  I  would  wager  he  has  a  copy  of  Burns  in 
his  sporran,  and  has  quoted  him  a  half  dozen  times  to 
the  grim  Celt  who  is  walking  with  him.  Those  old 
boys  don't  read  for  excitement  or  for  knowledge,  but 
because  they  love  their  land,  and  their  people,  and 
their  religion — and  their  great  writers  simply  express 
for  them  those  emotions  in  words  they  can  understand. 
You  and  I  come  over  here  with  thousands  of  our 
countrymen,  to  borrow  their  emotions.  It  is  lovely, 
it  is  romantic,  and  it  stirs  your  heart  and  mine,  be 
cause  we  were  raised  on  Scott  and  Burns.  In  Eng 
land  we  travel  from  place  to  place  in  the  same  way 
on  a  wave  of  memory  and  emotion,  because  we  have 
always  read  the  great  Englishmen  who  loved  their 
country  and  honored  it  by  writing  about  it  with 
feeling. 

DIANA  :  It  is  almost  as  bad  as  loving  another 
man's  wife  and  neglecting  your  own. 

122 


ADRIAN  :  And  yet  these  Britishers  accuse  us  of 
bragging  about  our  country  !  The  millionaire  from 
Oshkosh  may — but  our  writers  don't.  Many  of  them 
hardly  show  it  decent  respect. 

DIANA  :  The  old  school  did  —  Hawthorne, 
Cooper,  Simms,  Brockden  Brown,  Emerson,  Whit- 
tier. 

ADRIAN  :  And  their  works  endure  in  the  hearts  of 
their  countrymen.  But  the  men  of  to-day — aren't 
they  building  up  a  beautiful  set  of  literary  associa 
tions  for  their  countrymen  ?  Imagine  our  descend 
ants  making  pilgrimages  to  the  house  where  our 
Daisy  Millers  were  (according  to  tradition)  supposed 
to  have  lived  and  spoken  bad  English  ;  where  our 
Tom  Sawyers  locked  in  their  school  teachers  ;  to  the 
ruins  of  the  Tuxedo  Club  to  see  where  Charley  Rich 
broke  his  stick  and  swore  horribly  when  he  was  re 
fused  by  Miss  Million  ;  to  Beacon  Street  in  search  of 
the  lamp-post  under  which  Miss  Prudence  stood  wher 
she  consulted  with  her  Soul ! 

DIANA  :  That's  enough.  I  know  the  whole  tribe, 
and  I  would  not  walk  half  a  block  if  I  were  assured 
that  I  could  shake  hands  with  any  one  of  them  in  the 
flesh.  But  see,  there  is  the  sun  shining  on  the  Castle 
of  Inverness,  and  the  purple  hills,  and  a  gleam  of 
Moray  Firth  !  It  is  lovely  and  I  love  it,  and  it  is 
the  end  of  a  beautiful  day. 

ADRIAN  :     Then  why  do  you  look  pensive? 

DIANA  (laughing}  :     I  was  thinking  by  contrast  of 
the  way   in   which   the  sinking   sun  strikes  the  red 
123 


tower  of  the  Produce  Exchange,  and  old  Liberty's 
halo,  and  the  Brooklyn  Elevators 

ADRIAN  :  And  the  Multi floor  Apartment  House 
on  Fifty-ninth  Street,  and  a  six-room  flat. 

DIANA  :      Yes — home. 

ADRIAN  :     The  Home  of  our  Romance. 

{Chorus  of  '  bus  drivers:  "Royal  Hotel,  sir" 
"  Culloden  Inn,"  "Sutherland  Anns"  "  Take  you 
right  up '.") 


124 


A  LITTLE  DINNER  IN  ARCADY 


A  LITTLE  DINNER  IN  ARCADY.* 


LIFE  and  Miss  FANNY  DE  SIECLE  (costume  after  Gibson). 
MR.  HOWELLS  and  Miss  DIANA  (ot'The  Crossways). 
MR.  JAMES  and  THE  EGYPTIAN  (of  Thrums). 
MR.  CRAWFORD  and  Miss  DAISY  MILLER  (of  Schenectady, 
N.  Y.). 

MR.  BUNNER  and  MRS.  HAUKSBEE  (of  Simla). 
MR.  PAGE  and  PRINCESS  SARACINESCA  (of  Rome). 
MR.  MEREDITH  and  MEH  LADY  (of  Virginia). 
MR.  KIPLING  and  Miss  PENELOPE  LAPHAM  (of  Boston). 
MR.  BARRIE  and  Miss  MIDGE  (of  South  Washington  Square). 

SCENE. — A  round  table  in  the  Octagon  room  of  a  wayside  inn,  over 
looking  the  Valley  of  Arcady.  In  the  centre  of  the  table,  a 
mound  of  flowers,  on  which  appears  the  motto,  "  While  there's 
Life  there's  Hope."  The  ladies  of  the  party  wear  costumes 
which  represent  many  different  styles  of  the  past  decade,  and 
are  evidently  suspicious  of  the  social  standing  of  each  other. 
The  men  have  long  known  each  other  in  Arcady,  are  more  at 
ease,  but  are  evidently  not  quite  sure  that  they  approve  of  the 
ladies.  As  the  dinner  advances  and  the  wine-glasses  are  filled 
andrefilledwith  Falernian  and  Nectar,  the  constraint  vanishes 
and  everybody  talks. 


MISS  FAN   (to  LIFE,   who  is  in  love  with  her)  : 
You  dear  boy,  why  did  you  give  me  the  place 
of  honor  at  the  table  ? 

*  Written  for  the  Jubilee  Number  of  Life. 
127 


LIFE  :  Because  you  are  the  bud  of  the  past  dec 
ade,  and  you  will  be  the  perfect  flower  of  the  coming 
one.  Every  man  of  us  here  would  rather  please  you 
than  all  the  rest  of  the  world. 

Miss  FAN  :  What  a  dance  I  lead  you  !  Don't  you 
find  that  I  am  hard  to  please  ? 

LIFE  (with  intention}  :  You  are  always  kind  to 
me,  dear. 

Miss  FAN  :  For  that  pretty  speech  I'll  try  to  be 
gracious.  But  honestly,  boy,  I  don't  like  your 
guests — the  women  I  mean.  They  are  hardly  in  our 
set.  Where  did  you  pick  them  up  ? 

LIFE  :  I  told  each  man  to  bring  one  of  his  own 
family.  Then  I  mixed  the  names  in  a  hat  and  drew 
this  combination. 

Miss  FAN:  Well,  I  hope  they  like  it,  but  I'm 
sure  Mr.  Howells  looks  bored. 

LIFE  :  Why,  Diana  is  the  brightest  woman  at  the 
table,  but  very  romantic.  See  the  "flashing  arrows 
i  n  her  eyes  ' '  while  she  talks  ! 

DIANA  (to  LIFE)  :  I  know  you  are  talking  about 
me — but  I'll  forgive  you  if  it  was  kind.  I've  been 
telling  Mr.  Howells  that  I  like  his  American  girls, 
but  not  his  married  women — they  are  so  censori 
ous. 

HOWELLS:  They  don't  call  it  that  hard  name  in 
Boston;  it  is  simply  "accumulating  materials  for  a 
correct  diagnosis  of  character. " 

Miss   LAPHAM  :     We  are   not  all  given   to   back 
biting  in  Boston.      Most  of  us  are  charitable. 
128 


Miss  FAN  (aside  to  HOWELLS)  :  She  is  not  quite 
in  the  swim  in  Boston,  is  she?  Old  Silas  Lapham's 
daughter  ?  (raising  her  eyebrows)  Paint  ? 

MEH  LADY  :  You  Northern  gyurls  shouldn't  be 
so  critical  of  folks.  We  all  simply  flatter  our  sweet 
hearts,  and  lead  them  'round  with  a  gold  chain. 

DAISY  MILLER  :  Well,  I  like  that  !  Think  of  our 
flattering  Charley  Rich  and  his  set.  They  are  so 
conceited  now  that  they  think  all  the  girls  are  in  love 
with  them.  We  have  to  train  all  the  young  nobs 
down  with  sarcasm  before  they  are  endurable.  We 
are  onto  their  style. 

PRINCESS  SARACINESCA  (to  PAGE)  :  What  queer 
English  that  young  woman  speaks !  I  fear  that  I 
must  have  had  an  uncultivated  teacher  in  Rome. 
It's  all  so  strange  to  me. 

PAGE  :  You  must  come  and  visit  us  in  Ole  Vah- 
ginia,  my  deah  lady,  to  heah  the  real  old  English 
language.  We  are  descended  from  .  .„..;.._ 
the  Cavaliers,  madam. 

PRINCESS  :  Now,  I  understand 
the  peculiar  spelling  in  "  Marse 
Chan."  It's  old  English,  isn't  it, 
like  Chaucer  and  Beowulf? 

PAGE  (shifting  the  subject)  :    Oh, 


I  say,  Meh  Lady,  you  must  invite 
the  Princess   down    to    the    old 
plantation.     She  is  writing 
a    book     about    America, 
and  I  reckon  it  will  be  all 
129 


FAN. 


"Boston    and    New  York  as    usual,  unless    we   divert 
her. 

MRS.  HAUKSBEE  :  Invite  me  too,  please.  I  want 
to  see  America.  I  only  know  what  I've  read  about 
it  in  Mr.  James's  novels,  and  what  Mr.  Kipling  has 
told  me. 

BUNNER  (behind  his  hand  to  PAGE)  :  She  must 
have  a  beautiful  chromo  picture  of  us  then  in  her 
mental  gallery.  Imagine  taking  your  impression  of 
America  from  James  and  Kipling  ! 

KIPLING  (laughing) :  Come,  now,  Bunner,  I 
could  not  help  hearing.  Have  not  I  atoned  for  the 
sins  of  my  youth  with  "The  Naulahka?"  Isn't 
Tarvin  a  good  American  ? 

BUNNER  :  He's  not  a  real  American ;  only  a 
newspaper  American,  made  by  the  drummer  and  the 
"  funny  man." 

KIPLING  :     And  never  met  with  outside  of  Puck  ! 

BARRIE  :  What  I've  come  over  here  to  see  is  a 
real  American  girl. 

Miss  FAN  (with  a  glance  around  the  table]  :  You 
won't  find  her  in  contemporary  novels. 

DAISY  MILLER  (consciously)  :  I  think  Mr.  James 
has  done  us  justice. 

Miss  FAN  (maliciously)  :  Oh,  yes,  he  has  done 
justice  to  some  of  the  freaks  we  annually  export. 

JAMES  (calmly}  :  Why  do  you  keep  some  of  your 
best  freaks  at  home  then?  I  can't  make  bricks  with 
out  straw. 

MEH  LADY  (gently)  :     We  are  not  all  nervous  and 
130 


impertinent  over  here.  Come,  visit  us  oftener,  Mr. 
James. 

THE  MIDGE  :  Oh,  who  would  say  so  cruel  a  thing 
about  us?  I've  found  everybody  so  kind  in  New 
York. 

Miss  FAN  (aside  to  LIFE)  :  A  little  Bohemian 
from  the  French  quarter — that  kind  is  always  gener 
ous.  They  live  in  such  a  little  bit  of  a  world  and 
have  to  help  each  other. 

THE  EGYPTIAN  :  It  seems  to  me  that  all  you 
American  girls  know  too  much.  You  have  no  illu 
sions,  no  romance.  In  Scotland  we  still  occasionally 
die  for  the  man  we  love. 

Miss  FAN  :  How  horrid  !  Over  here  that  sort  of 
thing  only  happens  in  Bowery  hotels,  among  for 
eigners. 

BARRIE  :  Ay.  But  what  does  the  real  American 
lass  do  for  the  man  she  loves  with  all  her  soul  ? 

Miss  FAN:  Marries  him,  every  time.  He  can't 
escape  her,  and  would  not  if  he  could.  That  is  why 
I  don't  approve  of  you  good  people  who  write  our 
novels.  You  make  us  so  shallow  in  our  artifices,  and 
often  so  vulgar  and  impertinent.  Really,  don't  you 
see  that  the  girl  of  the  period  uses  finesse  with  sincer 
ity  ?  That  is  where  you  misinterpret  us.  We  are  not 
artificial ;  we  simply  combine  the  business  tact  that 
we  inherit  from  our  fathers,  with  the  fidelity  and  re 
ligious  instincts  that  we  inherit  from  our  mothers. 

KIPLING  :  A  sort  of  combination  of  the  best 
traits  of  Becky  Sharp  and  Amelia  Sedley — 


CRAWFORD  :  With  a  considerable  addition  of 
jewelry  and  frocks.  It  seems  to  me  that  you  more 
than  ever  overdress  the  part  of  the  ingenue. 

Miss  FAN  :  Another  of  the  mistakes  of  our  novel 
ists  !  Our  beautiful  frocks  have  raised  the  art  stand 
ards  of  the  country.  Our  fathers  have  been  forced 
to  build  houses  and  buy  furniture,  and  fixtures,  and 
broughams  to  accord  with  the  lovely  costumes  of 
their  charming  daughters.  A  fine  jewel  must  have 
an  appropriate  setting,  and  we've  got  it. 

HOWELLS  :  Very  well,  how  would  you  have  us 
picture  the  girl  of  the  new  decade,  Miss  Fan  ? 

Miss  FAN  :  She  must  be,  like  my  dear  Diana, 
"  A  man  and  woman  for  brains  ;  "  her  beauty  will  be 
the  flower  of  health;  her  wit,  the  polish  of  the 
world  ;  her  sympathy,  the  result  of  a  true  insight  into 
our  "moral  predicament,"  as  Mr.  James  delights  to 
call  it.  She  will  be  a  patriot  and  an  optimist  always. 

MEREDITH  :  I  like  to  hear  you  say  that.  I  am 
getting  to  be  an  old  man,  but  I  believe  more  and 
more  in  the  promptings  of  nature  in  youth.  How 
can  any  one  live  near  to  nature  without  being  an  op 
timist  !  I  don't  mean  the  trees  and  flowers  only — 
but  near  to  men  and  women  who  live  and  suffer,  and 
hope. 

HOWELLS  (rising}  :  Here's  to  the  flower  of  the 
century — the  American  Girl !  May  we  love  her  in 
our  homes,  do  her  full  justice  in  our  books,  and  wear 
her  image  in  our  hearts  ! 

Miss  FAN  :  And  here's  to  the  eyes  of  the  next 
132 


century,  through  which  posterity  will  see  us — the 
American  Novelist !  May  he  always  picture  us  as 
good  as  we  are,  and  never  better  than  we  ought  to 
be! 

LIFE  :  And  here's  confusion  to  all  Critics  who  re 
fuse  to  appreciate  the  American  Girl  and  the  Ameri 
can  Novelist  ! 


THE   END. 


133 


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imf 


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